


Becoming Pandora

by Cybertronic Purgatory (orphan_account)



Category: Borderlands
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-06
Updated: 2013-02-10
Packaged: 2017-11-23 20:17:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 30,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/626115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Cybertronic%20Purgatory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charting the rise of the man who will eventually become Handsome Jack, originating from when he is merely John, father of a girl with big blue eyes and terrible powers that ruin and blesses his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> "I have left  
> My strong identity, my real self,  
> Somewhere between the throne, and where I sit  
> Here on this spot of earth." — Hyperion, John Keats
> 
> "Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave  
>  A paradise for a sect; the savage too    
> From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep  
>  Guesses at Heaven." — Fall of Hyperion, John Keats

Childbirth, John realizes, is a torture he can never comprehend.

 

Moneta is too silent, clutching at her chest as they hurry to the hospital. There is no color on her face, no sweat on her brow, and John mistakenly thinks she’s taking it well, but as he helps her out of the car blood rushes down the insides of her legs and onto his shoes before she whimpers and collapses. He’s helpless and the medical staff can do no better, talking about the precarious balance of two lives; one doctor takes him to the side and asks which one he would chose should it come to such a point.

 

He stares dumbly at the man and can’t find the right answer. ”Both,” he says, ”I want them both alive.”

 

The doctor sighs, shakes his head, and John punches him in the blind rage that wells up. Losing either is not an option. In turn, the doctor swings back, and then John is confined to the waiting room with cotton stuffed up his nose as he contemplates the prospect of losing wife or child, or both.

 

They expected it, a little at least, but he never guessed it would be this bad. The child, through the entire pregnancy, took a severe toll on Moneta who became confined to bed for months, sleeping and eating and stroking her belly, beseeching the terrible child to be nice to her. ”I’ll treat you well,” she promised, hand moving back and forth as she writhed in bed, gasping for air. ”I’ll love you forever. I already do.”

 

Yet the child wrings the last life from her already suffering heart, and Moneta almost gives in. When the doors swing open to the maternity ward, everyone in the room hears her cries, hears the ripping and tearing and wet splashes. They all freeze, terrified, glance at him and then away. Many leave. His nose continues bleeding and his head grows light.

 

Leaning back, he thinks of their brief love and the possibility of it ending right then and there. Of the way Moneta first smiled at him two years ago when he spilled ink all across his shirt and how she slipped him a t-shirt. First day of his job and she being the only one looking out for him. A cutthroat office and she didn’t care to put the knife to his neck, just about making him smile, about covering his back.

 

And the day he took her hand, asking her to stay late and help him on a project – that she accepted, yet again with that smile that drove him slightly insane. And love, how insidious, how sneaky, how utterly destroying. They caused a scandal in the office and ended up leaving under honorable circumstances, more or less. What did it matter to them? They had each other, a big house, severance, and he found a new job within the day.

 

He rose and she fell into bed, where she has kept falling further away from him, energy leeched away. Towards the end, she can barely muster up the strength to lift her head and kiss him on the lips.

 

Their child has been a murderous parasite from day one. He wonders how much worse she will get.

 

The thoughts leave him tired. Another place beckons. Despite the horrifying sounds he gives in, too drained to stay.

 

In his nightmares, he finds himself back where he began: Pandora. The terrible planet which drew in his family and then killed his parents when fortunes turned, leaving him in the care of his grandmother. He has long since left the place behind, not even spared it as much as a thought. What has there been to think about but sand and misery and turquoise skies?

 

Yet Pandora unravels before him, the thick night sinking fast with only blue lights to guide him. The path is the same caked earth as the dirt road outside their home, leading down the hill to the village. All the buildings are empty, the streets silent. The blue light grows stronger, pulling at him with a force that makes his teeth ache.

 

 _Do you remember the legend of the Vault?_ The question makes him laugh. Of course he knows it. As a child, he dreamt of it, of being the hero crowned with the glory of discovery.

 

Then he grew up and tore himself away, leaving. _Do you know the legend of the Vault?_ What he knows is that it once nearly drove him insane, just like everyone else. He had to leave. He doesn’t want to remember and he doesn’t want to know, because that Vault, it sinks its claws into you, a ghost that haunts each thought and drive away any semblance of peace. It gnaws, insistent, calling your name over and over. The only way to silence it is to find it or…

 

He wakes with a start, rubbing at his face as a nurse stares him down. His nose hurts less and he pulls the cotton out from his nostrils.

 

She hands him a slender glass of champagne. ”Congratulations,” she says, ”it’s a baby girl.”

 

”And my wife?”

 

”Still fighting.”

 

He knocks it back and gets up. ”Let me see her.”

 

”Sir, your wife, she’s…”

 

”No, not her. I want to see my daughter.”

 

Swaddled in white cloth and put in a plastic box to stabilize, she looks little more than a shrunken prune of a child. The skin, pinkish-purple and wrinkled, isn’t what he expected. The mouth opens and closes, the remaining umbilical cord looking like a cancerous lump protruding from her convex stomach. So feeble and weak – Moneta has already told him of the softness of their heads, how pushing at the wrong place can send your finger spearing right through their brain, and how he will have to hold her a certain way to keep her neck from snapping.

 

”What a little shit,” he mutters to himself, all alone with a glass of stale, cheap champagne and a newborn baby. Never before in his life has he felt as powerless and useless as in that moment.

 

As John paces up and down the corridor, waiting to hear word on Moneta’s life dangling by the thread, he presses his face against the observation glass and glares at their child. **_Angel_**. Moneta said the name spoke to her, but it merely annoys him, a leftover myth from ancient times. He read up on them, about how they act as the bridge between the flawed mortals and the divine celestials, but seeing as the sky has become space has become conquered, what use is there for them?

 

”Guarding,” Moneta argues in his head, in the same tone she used when she wrung his hand while still smiling. She hates losing arguments. ”They guard, they protect, they guide.”

 

”Neither of which we need,” John would say back, only that now Moneta is closer to death than his arms and Angel has already failed to fulfill her task – she’s more of a demon than anything benevolent. Or would be, but he doesn’t believe in angels, demons, or anything of that sort, because he’s a civilized man who has let go of any superstitious beliefs.

 

And he is a civilized man biting his hand in the bathroom stall, trying not to kick down the walls. He has no idea what to do with himself because his wife is dying and his daughter, born four hours ago, has entered life on a lethal note and she can’t even look at him, just… Lies there. Red and useless and frail, tiny and… His.

 

She’s his daughter and he doesn’t really grasp that either, a concept that suddenly brings him to that strange brink he recognizes so well.

 

Asking one of the nurses if he can hold her, they carefully place Angel in his arms, beaming at them. He reflects their facial expressions, mirroring the joy they think he should be going through. Hunching over her he makes himself into the protective bubble around her and he whispers a curse in her ear, a curse aimed at her. She sleeps blissfully, snuggling closer to his chest, and he curses her once more for all the misery she’s caused.

 

Together they wait. The nurses teach him how to care for her, and it dawns upon him how reliant she is, her survival hinging upon his will to give. Her life in his hands.

 

As the sun creeps over the horizon, the doctor comes to let him know. His relieved laughter bounces between the walls as they walk to her room; he squeezes Angel so hard she wakes up and starts crying. Though the doctor talks with a severe voice, listing complications, precautions, future scenarios, John can’t stop himself as he rushes in to Moneta.

 

”Look at you,” she croaks out, one hand on his cheek and the other curled around Angel’s tiny ones. ”My loves.”

 

* * *

 

 

Time heals all wounds, supposedly. John waits, and some hurts do close up.

 

He grows to love Angel in spite of what she did to Moneta, but the nugget of distrustful hatred remains, waiting to take root again. At night, he wonders, tumbling into the dark abyss of questions no father should need to answer, and pulls himself out through going into her bedroom and watching her sleep. He reminds himself that he has hands large enough to crush her neck in a few seconds. That if need be, he can end it… Physically.

 

Mentally is another thing.

 

So he kisses her forehead and goes back to the rhythms of the day, content enough.

 

Moneta quits her job and becomes a housewife, reluctantly at first but then blissfully. The weakness in her heart  is remedied and augmented with cybernetics, implants that do the beating her muscles are too weak to do on their own. Her breath is shallow and her sighs deeper, but she smiles just the same, bouncing Angel on her lap. Their miracle, she says, though John argues that there is nothing miraculous, just fortune dealing them a good hand.

 

”You believe in nothing,” she accuses.

 

”No, I believe in many things.” A hand crawls under the covers, cupping her left breast. ”I believe that this heart of yours will keep beating because I feel it, because when I do this…” He rolls her over onto her back, pressing his ear against the chest. ”I hear the little ticks of technology. I believe in that. In progress.”

 

”You’re boring.”

 

”Myths aren’t part of the real life experience.” Kissing the curve of her breast, bigger than he remembers them, he traces his lips up her neck. ”Myths are lies told to keep the fools at bay. What’s real is what you can grasp.” He smiles and she does too.

 

She believes his lies so well that he almost does too.

 

Angel grows too quick for him to keep up; years pass while he chips away at tasks that never seems to end… And once one does, another consumes all his time. Work defines his life and Angel registers only on weekends, but when he does wake up on those days, they’re completely dedicated to her. They play the classic games, chess and cards; anything where she can develop a strategy to use against him tickles her fancy and he admits, it does for him as well. She’s clever and quick, often outmaneuvering him with a few feints so finely placed that he can only applaud her effort.

 

When they take a break, he pulls out a book and she climbs into his lap, following his finger as he reads out loud. Her furrowed brow is entirely focused on making sense of the letters connecting to the spoken words, and though Moneta says he’s pushing her to develop too fast, he sees no fault with that. ”Angel’s intelligent,” he points out, ”don’t stifle that. Or is this about something else? Huh? Do you feel left out?” While his words are just teasing, Moneta pulls her shoulders up and looks out the window.

 

”She really likes you. She looks up to you, but me? It’s… It’s hard to tell.”

 

”You’re her mother, of course she loves you.”

 

”Hmm.”

 

The weeks stack up, becoming years, as Angel grows taller and her smile widens, the big blue eyes becoming all the more captivating. As daughter loves father, he manages to love her almost as much, except for one thing that unsettles him: each year upon her birthday, he comes back to the dream begun that night in the hospital.

 

On her fifth, it comes back to him as he drifts off in the evening. The party is long since over, but Angel, riding high on the effects of sugar upon her nervous system, keeps him up. Finally having convinced her to play with something else, he tries to read but his head is too heavy. Closing his eyes, he immediately finds himself back in that terrible landscape of his youth.

 

In his dreams, he remembers Pandora. He tastes the dust on his tongue, the acrid sand slipping between the cracks and into their rooms; no matter how much they swept it stayed. Outside the landscape shifted day by day, the scorched ground cracking as the summer went on, years growing longer as the days grew crueler.

 

Under his feet, the ground shifts, unstable; above, the night sweeps in, offering a cool protection as shadowy figures resembling people he vaguely recalls unwrap their rough clothing around the fire. The stories all bore him, tedious and rambling, except one. It lacks in nuance, always told with the same suggestions: of the great hunter, guided by the guardian, that will reveal the greatness within the vaults. There is not much embellishment to add, but everyone who tells it makes the same mistake. They claim it’s a legend, a story inherit in Pandora’s wild nature to drive weaker men insane with impossible dreams.

 

_They commit a grave error. It’s not a legend, but a prophecy._

 

In his dreams, he stands on Pandora’s soil, knowing the path. Key in hand and guardian’s instructions in mind, he finds the way to glory.

 

The cruelest things about dreams is how they end: abruptly, right at the moment when the gates open everything crashes as he jolts upright. He fell asleep mid-sentence again, and lacks the energy to try to find his place. Putting down the book in his lap, John stretches out on the couch and yawns. On the floor, Angel sits hunched over a pile of papers. She grabs the crayon box, puts one in and then takes another out before closing up, movements neat and efficient.

 

”What are you drawing?” he asks, dutifully curious. Moneta has told him to show interest, even when all she holds up is poor stick figures she claims to be people he knows. Lines are lines.

 

When she holds up the drawing he drops the book, then grabs her by the wrist and wrenches the drawing out of her hand. He’d know the symbol anywhere. It’s ingrained into his bones; if someone woke him up in the middle of the night and asked him to identify his home-world, he’d just draw that symbol. It is home, as much as anything can be.

 

”Where did you see this?” He’s angry, unable to control the rise of his voice. From further down the corridor, he hears Moneta open a door to tell him ’ _calm down_ ’. ”Where, Angel?”

 

”I…” She stutters, eyes looking everywhere but at him.

 

”Answer me!”

 

”John!” Moneta’s stern shout does nothing to stem the rising tide.

 

Angel’s eyes darken, in a way no human eye should. Her skin becomes fire under his hands and then a burst of light knocks him back, sending her to one side of the room and him to another.

 

Struggling to regain the breath knocked out of him, he crawls across the floor to where she lays. ”Angel?" He shakes her, electric sparks shooting from her naked skin to his hand. The sharp sting of the shock makes him pull away again, and he sees a strange shimmer all around her, a shift in the room's atmosphere happening as white light encircles her head, the jagged edges of electric arcs creating a thorn crown. "Angel, honey! What are you doing?"

 

”It came to me in a dream…” Her eyes brim over with tears, but as soon as they hit her skin they fizzle to nothing. "I'm so sorry, dad." She lets out a piercing scream, and he barely has time to cover his eyes before being lashed with the electricity himself. His arms ache and the entire room smells of burnt wires and skin, the light burning his retinas raw. Then it stops as suddenly as it started, ended with the dull thud of a body hitting the floor.

 

"What's going on?" Moneta calls from down the hall, hurried footsteps echoing against the laminated floor.

 

John peels himself off the floor just in time to see his wife give out a silent cry as she dives for their daughter's limp body, shielding Angel from him. "Baby, it's okay…"

 

"What have you done to her?" Moneta demands, cradling the unconscious Angel in her arms. "Why would you do this? What's wrong with you?"

 

"Nothing…" Anger rises in him, the frustration Moneta often manages to awaken and worsen with her poorly chosen words. "She just did it herself…"

 

"Look at her arms! Look at these burns! We need to get her to a hospital!"

 

Instinct tells John not to, a nagging memory at the back of his mind, pushed far and deep away. There is something eerily familiar about the marks on Angel's skin, a legend or a fairy tale, an unreal saga… And like all things from Pandora, a terrible curse to shatter any semblance of peace.

 

* * *

 

 

He prides himself on giving not only Moneta, but Angel, anything they desire. He has means, he possesses wealth, and he knows how to get his way. They live an opulent life, their house adorned with only the finest. He had it built to complement Moneta, tailored to suit her tastes down to the kitchen sink and ceiling fixtures. Nothing has been out of his reach, because he loves her so and he knows of no way to limit that adoration, so he built her a mansion to keep her. She entered in love, and she continues to love him in that strange homely bliss he doesn’t fully understand. Everything about their lives is like a dream, a foreign sensation he pinches himself to make sure it didn't dissolve.

 

Their lives are nothing like what he comes from, yet he never worries it will end, because what can threaten a blessed heaven? And yet as he sits in the doctor’s office, he finds that the threat was the one they took in years ago.

 

"They aren't burns," doctor Lythe says, dialing up a number at his console. "I'm afraid your daughter is a siren."

 

How easily the world crumbles. How easily the civilized man finds himself reduced to nothing. ”What?" 

 

"Siren. Surely you've heard of them."

 

"They are children's stories. Stories. As in, not real." If he listens hard enough, he can hear Pandora laughing.

 

"Quite the opposite. Rare as they are, their existence is real, just poorly documented. Congratulations, and my condolences, but this is the law." Lythe taps his fingers on the desk’s surface. ”Hello? Yes, I have to report–”

 

Catching on, John leans over the table and ends the call, much to doctor Lythe's frustration. "Sir, it's not my decision, the government…"

 

"What would they do to her?"

 

"I'm not sure, but trust in them to give her a better life…”

 

John bristles. Taking the doctor by the throat, he slams the shorter man against the wall. "No, you listen to me," he hisses, "they want my baby girl. They want to take her away from me."

 

"It's standard procedure…"

 

"Sssh." He punches the man in the ribs and a bone cracks under his hands, only making him tighten his hold around the throat. "Don't you dare suggest anyone can give her a better life than me. Don't you dare."

 

”This is…” Lythe’s face reddens, becoming purple. Blood vessels burst in eyes that look ready to pop out of his skull, tongue lolling out and getting saliva all over John’s hand. The body stiffens and then goes soft, but John keeps pressing at the throat for another five minutes, just to make sure. His head is pleasantly empty of thoughts as he waits – no panic, no nervousness, no regrets – just a very simple desire: to protect Angel. To keep her.

 

When he’s sure the doctor is dead, he sits him down at the desk, pulls the blinds and goes through the pockets. Finding the keycard, he considers the options and decides quickly. He turns off the lights and locks the door after himself, walking with a restrained hurry in his steps to get back to where Moneta and Angel wait for him.

 

"We're leaving," he says in a tense whisper pushed out between a faked smile. "Grab your coats, hurry home and pack, but we have to go. _Now_."

 

Moneta follows in silence. She packs a few belongings, less than he’d expect, but she makes a lazy motion with her hand, imitating the swiping of a card. They can always get new stuff. She runs her hands across the surfaces – the wallpaper in the living room, the marble countertops in the kitchen, the oak desk in her study. She lingers in the garden house, coming out with dirty fingernails and red eyes.

 

For himself, he only fills half a bag with his own stuff – three books, some clothes, all the necessary valuables – then takes the rosewood chess set and two sets of cards. Though he looks everywhere, he can’t find the drawing Angel made. Without it, the entire day seems frustratingly unreal, as if none of it happened for a reason. As if it was all random chance.

 

On the last departing night shuttle, they take up a row to themselves. Moneta sits by the aisle and Angel by the window, John sandwiched between them. He holds a book open and while he manages to read, it only registers on a shallow note, far too conscious of the miseries of his girls.

 

Moneta, taking two pills to help her sleep, reaches over him and pats Angel on the cheek. ”What trouble you have caused us,” she says, resigned, slumping back into her seat as the drugs takes effect.

 

Angel curls up in her seat, and John places his jacket around her shoulders. He doubts she understands the quiet conspiracy between them, but what goes unsaid that night on the shuttle could fill Tolstoy novels.

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

It never stops raining on Core Hyperion. The rain pours and drowns the streets, fills up corners with puddles that ruin shoes, soaks through clothes and causes all hems to chafe – but nothing ever gets cleaned, the skies never break open to sunshine. A rain that never ends is not a cleansing one, just a miserable drizzle dissolving all into a gray mass. 

 

They went between worlds until finally settling there. Corporation-owned worlds are easier to disappear on, and they quickly blend into the washed-out grayness. Moneta suggested it, and Moneta hates it the most, but stubbornly refuses to move elsewhere. ”If you won’t tell me why, then what’s the point?” She crosses her arms and he lifts his hands, palms facing up, but that’s where their conversations end whenever they attempt it.

 

He never tells her what he did, and it drives her to stay distant, her nervous hands constantly in motion, wringing over and over no matter what she tries to do. No TV show or book settles her anxiety, and she rises from bed in the middle of the night without a word to him. She paces the apartment, barely a quarter of their old house, pressing her hands to the walls as if trying to expand the rooms. She complains that she can’t breathe and tries to pry the windows open, but on the one hundredth floor of an apartment complex, they are bolted shut.

 

The space between them opens up and neither makes a move to bridge it. He keeps his mouth shut, and she looks at him as if he is a stranger.

 

"I did what I did to protect us," he says one day, combing his hair back in preparation for a job interview at a Hyperion subsidiary. Moneta glances up from her breakfast, the cereal soggy in the milk, and her face looks far more bloated than ever before, as it if has absorbed all the moisture and swelled in size. "And I promise you this: once things are good again, we'll move to someplace far more beautiful."

 

"That was our home. It was beautiful. It still is." Each sentence uttered with a sigh.

 

"Then I'll carve us a new place to be."

 

She nods, clearly disinterested.

 

"Hey." He catches her chin, holding it so tightly her skin pales near his fingers. "We're going to make it. Anything else isn't an option." Then he smiles and steals a kiss from her swollen lips, dashing out the door with Angel in tow, to drop her off at school on his way to the downtown office.

 

He doesn’t get it. Nor any of the other jobs he applies to, but he fails to tell Moneta, far too proud to admit that something went wrong. Each day he takes Angel to school then proceeds to bounce between office complexes, presenting his revised resumé at desks. Because of the incident with the doctor, he’s had to remove anything linking him back to their old lives, leaving a gap too large to be filled by mere talk, no matter the grand words he uses.

 

At the end of the school day, he pushes down any gloom and lets Angel sit in the passenger seat, taking her to whatever pleasant café he can find. He buys her bottles of soda, scoops of ice-cream, sweet pastries; he wipes crumbs from her cheek as they play chess and cards until the hour is late. They hold hands in the elevator up to their apartment, bracing themselves for the silent treatment they’re about to receive.

 

Life drags its heels, moving onwards. He feels misplaced on the new dreary world, which lacks in the cotton candy clouds and sycamore trees of their old homestead. The atmosphere is clogged with pollution and sky overcast from the vast oceans surrounding the mega-city. Moneta’s spirits keep sinking further. Her skin pales and though he tries, slipping her pamphlets and catalogues advertising all the grand things available to her, she sighs and opts to stare out the windows at the sheets of rain blurring the cityscape.

 

Their lives only come together once a day, the family unified around the morning ritual as they get up early to paint Angel’s skin. They go over her from top to bottom, covering the light blue tattoos. When Moneta touches them she says, ”they remind me of the skies at home” and she repeats it each morning. John suspects she draws a twisted enjoyment from watching Angel’s guilty squirm. Then, when it dries, they pull on long-sleeved sweaters and bandage the hand on hot days, otherwise poking holes at the sleeve’s hem to hook her thumb through. John signs slips every other day, excusing her from sports due to ’religious reasons’.

 

The less attention she draws, the better, but she overachieves to a ridiculous degree. Teachers ask him to stop doing her homework, but he explains that he has no idea she even gets assigned such tasks. In the bathroom, as he helps clean off the light beige gunk from her back, he quizzes her on what she’s up to. Angel shrugs, looking at her toes wriggling on the tiled floor.

 

He lowers his voice, sounding as stern as he can. ”Angel.”

 

"I just look," she says defensively.

 

”Look at what?”

 

”I… It’s hard to describe.”

 

Wiping off the last color, he drops the towelette in the bin. ”Then show me.” 

 

In her cramped room, she sweeps a hand across the computer interface on the table. Her hand becomes lit up, the peculiar glow the siren tattoos emanate growing in intensity the longer he stays quiet. She bounces on her heels in nervous agitation. Pages upon pages of text rush by on the screen before he realizes they come from her school textbooks, but some of the passing formulas and sentences seems far too advanced for her year. "It's nothing, really," she blurts, chewing on her lower lip. "I just see and understand."

 

"How far ahead are you?"

 

"I… Don't know exactly. I just kept reading and reading. There's not much else to do in class, I finish all the work and get bored.”

 

He grabs her shoulders. ”Angel, listen to me. You can't use your power in class, do you understand?"

 

"No one has noticed me doing it! I'm careful, I swear."

 

”Just don’t do it.” Letting go, he resumes skimming through what she’s showing him. "You'll take the exams at the end of the year."

 

Angel’s face falls. ”You're making me graduate early."

 

"It's for your own best. I can't protect you at school."

 

Not that he knows how to keep her guarded, when the paint that keeps her secret safe could be rubbed off at any time. He has no job, his wife refuses to look him in the eye, and their lack of security keeps him from sleeping soundly. Once he does, nightmares wreck through his mind, the images blurring before deteriorating into dusty and scratched fragments of a torn photograph.

 

”Dad,” Angel begins, hesitant but brimming over all the same. ”You remember the drawing I made?”

 

”Yes.”

 

”It’s related to Pandora, isn’t it?” And before he has time to compose himself and answer ’ _no_ ’, she strikes with another question. ”That’s your home, right?”

 

”It’s not anyone’s home. Or it shouldn’t be.”

 

”Why?” 

 

”Because it’s a bad place, sweetheart. It’s not a planet you want to call home.”

 

”But you grew up there.”

 

He forces a smile. ”Did mother tell you that?”

 

”I dreamt of it.” She goes on to describe the details, just as perfectly right and eerily vivid as he fears she could.

 

The next day, after he drops her off at school, he comes straight back home. Moneta has returned to bed where she rests fully dressed on top of the covers, the curtains parted, water refracting the streetlights outside with ghostly flashes passing across the ceiling.

 

He tells her everything she needs to know. There are omissions, of course – the Vault symbol, the things Angel dream about, the way doctor Lythe died under his hand – those being things he wishes to keep to himself, things she has no need to involve herself in. Things she could never understand, having never set foot on Pandora, never having known the madness of his youth and how it destroyed everything. For all her intelligence, she simply doesn’t understand what the lack of civilization does to a man.

 

She’s quiet as she takes in what he’s saying, inching herself up in a sitting position. A fine line appears right between her brows, she nods thoughtfully, then swings her legs over the side and puts on her shoes. ”I know what to do.”

 

That day reveals to him a great many things about Moneta: that her employment at Hyperion wasn’t just a simple job, but rather the combined effort of family friends and her own clever mind, coming together to form a career she put on hold because of him and Angel, both of which have lost their staying power.

 

So she makes a call and the same afternoon they sit in the high-rise office of a boss of… Some branch, John never quite catches what it is exactly that man does, but he sure as hell knows a fake title when he sees one. While he remains silent, Moneta lays it out in barely a minute, her firm smile saying: _if we don’t like your offer, we’re going elsewhere_. It should be saying: _I’m selling out my own daughter_.

 

"Hyperion can offer protection at a cost," Blake says, adjusting his tie as he gazes at John’s hands. His own are perfectly manicured and slender, tapering off at the tips: John’s are thicker, square and wrinkled from a harsh youth, the nails dirty. ”Of course, the potential of a siren is invaluable, but rest assured that Hyperion understands your emotional and familial bond. We will work together to ensure its continued integrity."

 

Afterwards in the car, he stares ahead without looking at Moneta, keys left unturned in the ignition. "Do you think they'll make sense of what she can do?"

 

”I’ll make sure of it,” she says with utter certainty.

 

 Deep down, he feels a blade twisting once, twice, something snapping sharply.

 

* * *

 

 

At Hyperion Corporation, he lands in a sea of desks, surrounded by mediocre men wearing bland ties and soft faces. He gets assigned to develop solutions for the Pandora Problem, as it is aptly named around the office. Apparently someone dug around in his files and found that he grew up there, which led to many jabs and a few startled faces, "how did you escape?" to which he'd laugh the first few times before growing tired of the joke. What he wants to say is ” _no one ever escapes, you just manage to evade it for a while_ ” but it’s a truth he’s not at peace with.

 

The Pandora Problem: a project for Hyperion’s half-hearted desire to examine the realistic existence of the Vault, which they deem more and more unlikely by the day, the percentage jokingly put up on the wall and adjust downwards each time someone wants to make a quick laugh at his job. He never smiles at that, just stares at the number, grits his teeth, and hammers the keyboard diligently.

 

In the afternoons, he picks up Angel from school and drives her over to the office. In the thirty minutes it takes to get her there through traffic, they talk like nothing is the matter. It’s easy to play pretend, though she is too old and too aware, her hands fretting with the sleeves of her jacket. Two wet curls peek out from under the hood and he tucks them in, but she flinches as he touches the port behind her ear.

 

The windshield wipers slosh water back and forth. She’s three months away from graduating, but there’s no further education in sight for her, no rest, nothing but what awaits at Hyperion.

 

Moneta meets them in the lobby and takes Angel with her into the basement, out of John’s grasp. He works several rungs below Moneta in the Hyperion hierarchy, and her pass-card unlocks more doors than his. All he can do is squeeze Angel’s hand and wait the hours until they all leave together.

 

Life twists and turns, but the inevitable flow is ever forwards, piercing through time. _The years may have passed_ , he thinks, snapping pictures of a shy Angel as she holds her diploma in hand, standing on stage surrounded by teenagers who can’t understand what that little kid is doing there. _The years may have passed_ … Repeating the fragmentary thought, he comes to no conclusion. They have passed, time has moved forward with a cruel inevitability, the once tiny and wrinkly baby crying in his arms is now being ushered into a role she has not chosen for herself.

 

And it just goes on.

 

On the wall by his cubicle, the estimated chance of the Vault being real sinks by the day. If he was a weaker man, he’d believe them. If he was a different man, he’d go up there, cross out the numbers, and show them the way, but he doesn’t know the path.

 

A whole year goes by where he rehearses the motions of the day: rise to button up the shirt and have Moneta do his tie, kissing him as her fingers work the fabric around his neck. They act as guardians and shepherds of Angel, who has long since stopped asking when John will next take her to a café. The chess set gathers dust in the living room where none of them go anymore, lives confined to set patterns and a late night/early morning dichotomy which divides and collects them. John has stopped looking at her in the rearview mirror, mostly due to the way her eyes plead silently with him, the question of ’ _is this it? Is this what we are drawn to be?_ ’ echoed there, but there is another reason he doesn’t admit to.

 

At lunch he meets Moneta in her office, and with the view of the mega-city bustling outside they eat. Often she locks the door and he takes the cue, unbuttoning her blouse to find the hundreds of reminders why he fell in love with her, and why he stayed with her, plus everything between. The little things, the important ones. He admires her, the way she just takes power and holds on to it as if it was her given right. When she speaks, the bosses listen, granting her whatever it is she asks for. She’s fearless, pushing the limits just a little bit further while smiling, and then doing it again just because she can.

 

In her presence, he feels uplifted by divinity taken human form, freed of the fears which bind him personally. Away from her, they settle right back in.

 

The constant duality, the lack and the have, the invigorated state and the drained one, keeps coming back. He’s something, someone – only to be reduced to no one, the face which Moneta peppers with kisses and loves so blending in with the thousand others on his floor. At desk H7, he’s just another of the others, the unidentifiable mass that matters little, pounding away at a keyboard processing information and passing it onwards.

 

No matter the words he use, the reports from Pandora get passed on, or put on hold, or lost in the bureaucratic paper shuffle. What he does matters to no one, but at night, the voice in his dreams returns, asking him about Pandora, about the Vault, insisting that it’s real while the campfire in the dark desert crackles.

 

If frustration could become flesh, it’d become him: John at desk H7, Pandora Problem Simplification and Processing Project, Hyperion’s Code and Data Division. A man breaking himself upon reality and dreams, mended by his wife who sets everything right with her soft touch. With Moneta, everything else becomes a static hum, the clarity she grants absolute. He whispers, holding her on the floor as she lights up a cigarette, ”I do believe, and it’s in you”, to which she laughs. The smoke gets in his eyes.

 

And so it just. Goes. On.

 

* * *

 

All they get is a year of relative peace, as peaceful as they can be. 

 

John’s weeding through a deluge of information gathered during the three-day weekend when the computer screen blacks out as he’s in the middle of reviewing a log from the Pandora surveillance instruments. No matter what keys he press, nothing happens, then light blue text appears.

 

**> Dad?**

 

He swallows.

 

**> Are you there?**

 

**Angel?** He types it out, and the screen flickers as if it’s about to blow up.

 

**> Wait…**

 

A video starts, the feed riddled with glitches and garbled audio, then suddenly becomes crystal clear as Angel stares right at him. Her blue eyes seem to go right through the camera, and as it pulls back he sees more and more of her face. Her lips are moving – ”Angel. Thirteen. Siren.” – but everything else about her is still. A trickle of blood starts down her temple, joining another one at her nose.

 

A voice off-camera draws her attention for a second before her eyes go back to staring straight into the camera. ”Angel, are you scared?”

 

”Yes.”

 

The video cuts out. A second later the screen starts reeking of smoke. Further down the row of perfectly symmetrical work spaces, he hears screams and panic as the fire alarm starts.

 

He takes Angel home – Moneta stays behind to assess damages – but stops on the way at an old-time café they once visited frequently. Letting her order whatever she pleases, he settles for a plain coffee, observing each mouthful she wolfs down.

 

”What happened today?” he asks.

 

She runs her finger over the rim of a teacup. ”I needed to show you. You have to understand.”

 

Leaning closer, he drops his voice low. ”What is going on down there?”

 

There’s no reply, and she avoids his gaze. After he locks her in at home, he drives back to the office. Due to the fire, the security system is far more vulnerable than normally, and he easily bypasses it to get down to where Moneta takes Angel each day. Just a door, labelled _A-S Project (Supervisor: Moneta),_ leading to two other rooms divided by a one-way mirror. One a bare white room, sterile and with warning signs (biohazard, magnetic field, high voltage) with a chair in the middle of it, haphazardly abandoned. In the other, instruments clutter the walls and tables, printed read-outs pooling on the floor. Both smell of put-out fires.

 

Moneta finds him there as he’s going through footage – Angel crying, Angel shining bright like a beacon, hours of Angel being prodded and asked and coerced – and she announces her presence by sighing. ”I should have known,” she says, looking disheveled.

 

”What have you been doing here?” There’s a place in him, a small fount of ice and darkness, into which he submerged when putting his hands around doctor Lythe’s throat. It’s the same fountain he sinks into as he turns to Moneta.

 

”Honey, look, what we’re doing is completely within company regulations, there’s nothing illegal going on.”

 

”Is this the childhood you’re giving her?”

 

”She’s a teenager now! And what do you know?” she snarls. ”You wouldn’t know a normal childhood if it slapped you in the face!” Moneta pushes her hair back, sitting down on the desk. ”She’s different, don’t deny her this.”

 

”This?” He motions at the equipment. ”Turning her into a lab rat?”

 

”We’re helping her understand who she is and what she can do.”

 

On the screen, the video interview with Angel progresses. _”Do you understand why we’re doing this to you?”_ a male voice asks, no doubt going through the company checklist. 

 

_”It’s because you don’t understand what I am,”_ Angel answers with a tired voice, not looking at him but directly into the camera. Her eyes make John clench his fists.

 

”Do you understand, John?” Moneta’s hand on his cheek is warm, but it brings him no clarity nor relief. It’s just a hand. She’s just a human. Her magic dissolves right in front of him, and he sees the faded glow in her face.

 

 ”I need to think on this,” he says.

 

Only he can’t. There are million thoughts, swirling madly, but none that lingers for more than a few seconds, and all of them merely leading to more questions.

 

So at night, he comes to Moneta, who straddles his hips and puts together the fractures. Though it is a crawl of defeat, of him kissing her feet and worshipping each inch of her perfect body as a vacillating believer desperately seeking faith, she makes sense of the pieces in her own way: by mauling him with her iron will.

 

Crushed and re-shaped, he falls into a deep sleep where the dreamscape once again turns into Pandora. The sky cracks above, light seeping and dripping in, heavy and liquid which fills the dusty abscesses of the hard desert, creating lakes and rivers. With the rushing motion all around him, the loud churn drowning out his own thoughts, he falls to his knees and the voice comes to him again. It starts a sentence, the first indistinguishable syllable cut short. As if the speaker decided against it.

 

Left alone, the light and the dark crash against each other, and he’s caught in the middle.

 

* * *

 

 

On the other side of the observation window, Angel's face contorts in a pain so deep his heart breaks from having to witness it, her body arching off the table. Even through the anesthetic she remains conscious, a setback that has hindered their progress… Up until now. Because he talked her into it. Because he promised it wouldn’t be that bad.

 

Moneta’s idea, of course. ”She looks up to you, John. Whatever you say is her rule." The added bonus being that he can tell a lie without a muscle twitching. Moneta fails there, her eyebrows moving and contradicting what her mouth says. Angel reads her mother too easily, but she struggles with her father. She trusts him though, heart open and eyes wide, hanging on to his words. ”Every word you say is her truth.”

 

He wonders for how long that will last, now that he is the reason she’s clutching at thin air, mouth opening and closing in half-formed screams.

 

”I should be in there holding the scalpel,” he says.

 

Moneta pauses in her note-taking, pen poised mid-way through the sweep of her ’ _j_ ’. The full word is ’ _subject_ ’; what their daughter has been reduced to. ”You know nothing about procedures like these.”

 

”I know the technology. There, look at that hack, he’s going way too deep, that wire is meant to be superficially sub-dermal, no more than a hair’s width, but he’s cutting…” Trailing off, he can’t bring himself to finish the sentence.

 

Moneta sighs, leaning forward to press the speaker button. ”Wyatt, ease up. You’re not gutting a fish.” She turns to him, giving him a look that asks _is that better? Can we get on with it?_

 

On his screen, shielded from Moneta’s view, the conversation continues.

 

**> When did you last dream of Pandora?**

 

**That’s not a question you’re allowed to ask.**

 

**> I see further than you can comprehend.**

 

**Who is this person you’ve become?**

 

**> Your daughter, your Angel. When did you last dream of Pandora?**

 

They stop discussing their daughter in any place they think she can hear them, and their paranoia excludes a great many places. Eventually they find themselves forced to drive to the capsule park far from their home just to be able to talk, but John can’t shake the feeling that she’s there with them.

 

”She’s an opportunity in herself,” Moneta says as they wander beneath the plastic trees. ”Stopping now is a waste of effort, we’re so close to…”

 

”Close to what?”

 

”Look, John, Atlas has a siren. Hyperion stands a chance to gain a superior advantage with Angel. Her talents are so raw, so malleable…”

 

”And what do you think we can use her for?”

 

She spreads her arms wide. ”The possibilities are endless!”

 

**> Yes. The possibilities are endless, but not for her.**

 

**What do you mean?**

 

**> It’s all going to be about you.**

 

**I don’t understand.**

 

**> Tell me about Pandora. I need to know.**

 

"I'm going to hurt mother today," Angel says at breakfast, as if it is the most natural thing in the world, a statement wedged in between two mouthfuls of toast.

 

Moneta is in the bathroom, door closed and shower turned on. She can’t hear them, but still he moves closer, speaking in a hushed whisper. 

 

"What's going to happen to her?”

 

"Something terrible."

 

"Angel, please. Tell me. I need to know."

 

"You will see."

 

”Listen to me, whatever you are planning on doing, whatever this whole thing you’re doing is, I am going to find a way to stop you. It’s not going to happen, do you hear me?”

 

”Destiny is not something a single man can change.”

 

”Fuck destiny, this is a choice you’re making! Stop it!”

 

”It’s not a choice. It is what must happen.” 

 

There are moments when Angel moves beyond being just a daughter and just a kid, her eyes attaining a depth not unlike oceans. A palpable shift happens, not just within but to her physical body, a change so undeniable that the hairs on his arms stand up. There is something within her that is not his doing, a quirk of fate which has blessed her with the curse of a siren’s powers. Nothing to do with him or Moneta, nothing to do with any of their choices – so who is he to deny destiny, to pretend fate is a lie?

 

Just because he can’t see it, doesn’t mean she’s bereft of the key to her own meaning. On the contrary, he suspects she knows far more than he ever will.

 

Doesn’t mean he won’t fight her on it.

 

”If you hurt her in any way…”

 

”You wouldn’t do that to me.”

 

”What makes you think that?”

 

She licks her lips nervously. ”You love me.”

 

”Love, sweetheart, makes us do very dangerous and decidedly cruel things.” His nails break her skin. ”You think about _that_.”

 

Throughout the day his high-strung nerves results in him snapping at any little mistake, sending Moorin into a nervous breakdown and Wyatt walking out early. Even Moneta scowls at his behavior, worried and annoyed. At lunchtime, he sits down and keeps waiting for the usual circular conversation with Angel to begin, but she fails to respond.

 

**Angel, it’s never too late.**

 

The door opens, and he immediately minimizes the chat window.

 

”Hey darling.” Moneta kisses his cheekbone and he waves her off, not in the mood for such affection. She punches his arm playfully. ”Don’t be such a grouch.”

 

”Well, I got a lot of things to go through here, so if you don’t mind?”

 

She holds up her hands. ”Fine, fine.”

 

He opens the chat again, finding a new message.

 

**> What happens today will begin a long chain of events. Keep in mind that this is not the beginning nor the end, and that I have seen both. Keep in mind that I am your daughter.**

 

**What are you talking about?**

 

**> This is what must happen, and I ask for no forgiveness, not now, not ever. Who are we to defy destiny?**

 

**Angel!**

 

**> But she has hurt me so much…**

 

In the room on the other side of the mirror, Moneta enters, and he can hear how the beating of his heart slows down. He bangs once on the window and Moneta turns. In that moment, lit up from behind by Angel’s supernatural glow, he sees the last of the goddess – the cocky smile, the wise eyes, the sharp lines of her perfect face – and how all that fades as she sees the approaching storm in the reflection.

 

A loud boom, sounding like the crack of thunder, rips through the room as light lashes at Moneta. Barely has it touched her skin before she sags into a pile on the floor, her limbs folding like soft fabric. She twitches and convulses.

 

The electricity goes out and the safety measures puts the two adjoining chambers into lockdown; he hammers on the window, screaming two names over and over, but neither moves. The stillness settles into him, fear seizing control, and all he can do is shout and shout, locked inside waiting for help to come. Time slows down, expands, and he watches desperately as the only two people he has ever loved slip away from him.

 

* * *

 

 

”Don’t tell her, John,” a delirious Moneta begs between wheezes, her voice a hoarse shadow of its former rich self. ”I’ll be fine. It’d just crush her.”

 

”Do you really think I can hide this from her? She sees things.”

 

”Then make her not see this. Anything. I can’t… It’s not her guilt to bear.”

 

He wants to say, _but it is. It’s her fault. This is all her doing_. Moneta drags her finger across the back of his hand. ”Don’t you dare. Promise me that. You promise me.”

 

She dies during the night. He stays by her side, and when it happens he lets go of her hand. He’d rather remember her warm than cold, alive than dead; the last look he gives her before she is cremated is the one in that dark room, the sliver of light falling in from the street making it appear as if she’s only sleeping.

 

And then the silence grips him, the sorrow following on its heels. Both are heavy and burdensome, both drive him back to where the miseries of his new life began.

 

Angel.

 

She stumbles behind him as he drags her through the corridors, bleary-eyed and sleepy. He tore her out of bed one hour earlier, and now he is going to tear her out of his life.

 

”Where’s mom?” she asks.

 

”Mommy is gone, Angel. She’s gone because of what you did. You killed her.” He swipes the card and brings her into the new lab dedicated entirely to Siren Research. All dedicated to peeling her existence apart without physically doing so.

 

”I…”

 

”She died. She died because of you. What you did to her is unforgivable. You are a bad daughter. But if you sit still in this chair and listen to what daddy tells you to do, then maybe I’ll be able to love you again. If you’re on your best behavior.” He pushes her into the seat, the fight gone out of her. ”Now sit down.”

 

Taking the leather straps to her skin, he fastens the buckles as tight as he can. She squeals and squirms until he puts his hand over her mouth to shut her up. Her tears wet his skin, her breath is hot against his palm, but he can’t show her any mercy – there’s none left.

 

”I lied, you know. That’s what daddies do when their daughters misbehave. And you’ve been very, very bad. I’m going to leave you here and I’m not coming back until you’re good again.”

 

A hiccuped sob is the first thing he hears as he removes his hand; turning to leave he closes out the desperate cries of a terrified little girl – _his_ terrified little girl – and ignores her pleas, since there’s nothing she can say or do to bring back the unconditional love he used to have for her. She exists in his heart on his terms now, and for the moment, he’s cutting her out with a dull knife.

 

”Dad, please!”

 

He stops, one foot over the threshold. Many words linger on the tip of his tongue, but for the first time in his life, he choses silence instead of the icy remark. It will hurt her all the more.

 

”Please… I didn’t mean to do it…”

 

The door shuts.


	3. Chapter 3

 

 

After two years of being kept deep in the experimentation core, locked away behind sealed doors many levels below ground, Angel starts killing people. At first everyone write it off as accidents, unfortunate as they are, but John knows better. He just doesn’t have the energy to care.

 

Between the dreary days at the office, staring at code until his eyes feel ready to fall out, and the nights at home in the desolate apartment, he has nothing left to give Angel. She’s easier to pass off as a project, and he wills himself to accept that she is in good hands, that she is well-fed and taken care of by people who can do that, because he doesn’t know what he’d do if faced with her again.

 

In his mind, it’s easier to say that two people died that day.

 

He packs up Moneta’s possessions reluctantly, taking his time to turn each of them over in his hands, only letting go of the clothes once her scent has dissipated completely. Their small apartment, he comes to realize, is a landscape for two: it’s Moneta and Angel, their items defining territory and boundaries. His own belongings can fit nicely in a suitcase.

 

More than once he entertains the thought of packing up and leaving, but his employment contract with Hyperion isn’t up for another three years. Leaving early means getting assassins sent after him. Where can he go, anyway? Even his dreams have abandoned him. Staying put is what he does best, he decides.

 

Angel’s room stays closed, the pictures of her removed. It’s too hard to look at them, the constant and merciless reminder of what has been taken from him. He tries not to hate her, reminds himself of the bond between them, but at night he dreams of all the ways in which he could take out the just vengeance upon her. Eye for an eye, until everything gets set right again. Though nothing can bring Moneta back, but…

 

But he shouldn’t, and he doesn’t. He leaves Angel’s room untouched, and at work keeps the distance of hundreds of floors between them, doing only the job of wading through the output. 

 

And for two years, he is hopelessly alone, choking on his own silence, before a man he vaguely recognizes comes to his desk. ”We need your help down in the basement labs.”

 

John blinks up at him. ”Why?”

 

”It’s about your daughter.”

 

Gritting his teeth, he goes back to work, trying to block out the impatient lab rat. 

 

”Hello?”

 

”I have no daughter.”

 

The man checks his papers, checks the personnel card above John’s computer, and then clears his throat. ”Sir, with all due respect, I’m authorized to bring you down there by force if I have to.” The fluorescent lights flicker as thunder echoes outside, yet no lightning flashes by. ”Please. It’s urgent.”

 

On the screen, a blue text John remembers so well types out a single word. He puts his fist through the screen, and with blood and glass shards dripping a trail behind him, he follows the other man downstairs. As they pass through security checks and change elevators, the man – named Wassily – explains in his asthmatic breathlessness. ”… Been on a closed circuit network up until now… She broke out… Inside help maybe, doesn’t matter. Need to contain… It’s getting out of hand. The light show up there wasn’t bad weather, it was her.”

 

John’s head snaps up. ”How can she do that?”

 

”She’s older. More powerful… We’ve augmented her, trained her… And now we can’t subdue her.”

 

”Why do you think I’ll be able to help?”

 

”Because she keeps calling out for her father. For you.” A final sweep of the card and there they are. On the other side of an observation window, a teenage girl stands in the middle, snarling angrily at anyone approaching her. The current around Angel rises, whirling wildly as she rises off the floor. ”Enough!” she cries, her voice cracking with static. ”I’ve had enough!” One of the researchers, clad in a protective hazmat suit, grabs her by the arms and pulls her down, yanking hard enough to draw a scream. It makes Jack’s blood curl.

 

”What have you been doing to her?”

 

”She’s been like this for months,” Wassily explains with no affection, ”but it’s gotten increasingly worse. We reasoned that she might react positively to your presence.”

 

”Sir,” a younger man approaches, stretching out his hand. ”It’s a pleasure to meet you, I’m–”

 

”The reason this is even happening!” Wassily snaps, glaring at the man who gazes at his shoes like a fool. ”You idiot, she’s fifteen, there is no planet in the Hyperion network where that is legal!”

 

John’s voice turns to ice, pointing an accusatory finger. ”What has he done to her?”

 

”It’s rather what she has done to him. She manipulated him into opening up the network and letting her out. She fooled him, and this imbecile went along thinking it was true love or some other nonsense…”

 

In the other room, the hazmat suit researcher gets knocked back, but he takes a swing at Angel before he goes down. She gasps from the backhanded slap to her cheek, and a surge of rage wells up in John’s chest. His voice drops an octave as he grabs Wassily by the collar. It doesn’t take him by surprise, just feels like the most natural reaction he’s ever had: someone is threatening his baby girl. That someone needs to pay. ”Back off from her, just let me…”

 

”We need to–”

 

”Fuck your needs!” John spits at Wassily’s shoes, then bangs on the glass. ”Angel!”

 

She looks up sharply, mouth hanging open as she stares at him through the window. It gives him pause. ”Can she see through this?”

 

”She shouldn’t be able to.” Wassily pushes his glasses up on the nose bridge, squinting. The last thing Jack sees of him is the slack jaw and shrinking pupils, and then every piece of equipment in both room explodes. Shrapnel shatters the windows and he falls to the floor, crawling under the desk as everything shorts out, melted plastic dripping down onto the floor in front of him and screams mingling with the crackling fires.

 

When the sprinklers go on, it just worsens, coming close to being an inferno. Screams rise and die sharply, one by one, until it’s just the crackle of fires. He’s bleeding and aching as he rises, senses assailed by the destruction around him. Shrill alarms, icy water, skin crawling. Dusting himself off he pushes the dislodged wall panels out of the way and climbs through into the other room. She stands in the middle of the chaos, a tiny circle around her feet perfectly untouched by what she has caused. Her chest moves in shallow bursts, fitful and anxious. He finds it difficult to focus on anything else but the majestic sight of what rises from her back: two white wings unfurl as she opens her eyes.

 

If John was a man of faith, he’d call that moment a religious experience. Instead, it’s a revelation of who she is. ”Angel…”

 

”You came back.” She smiles, letting out a relieved gasp. ”That was all I wanted.”

 

He steps closer, cautiously holding out his hands to take hers. ”I never left you.”

 

Her lower lip quivers and she hides her face in the bend of her arm. ”But you did…”

 

”Honey, shush. Come. Look,” he says, putting her in front of the cracked mirror. ”Look at yourself.”

 

They both stare the image: of the bloodied man in a wrinkled suit, eyes marred with dark circles and hair a mess with the first few grays showing at his temples, his hands upon the winged daughter. Her skin almost translucent, her clothes merely white patient robes, but the wings shudder along with each breath, the strange shape and look of them captivating to behold. He touches what seems like a feather but it dissolves, his fingers passing through, feeling only the familiar tingling of an electric current through his skin.

 

She twists her head around. ”Are you proud of me?” she asks, staring up at him through her wet lashes.

 

He tells a lie because it’s what she needs to hear. ”Yes. You have done magnificently.” Drying her tears with his seared thumb, he considers that maybe he doesn’t hate her as vehemently in that moment.

 

She smiles blissfully, succumbing to the exhaustion as she falls back into his arms. He catches her, picking her up as the wings disappear – and she’s just his little girl again. ”I’ll hold you tighter this time,” he whispers, kissing her brow as he carries her across the rubble.

 

* * *

 

 

Back home, John carries her across the threshold – he’s not a strong man, but she barely weighs anything, and he wonders how she has been treated for the past two years. Putting her down on her bed, he notes the many little incision scars and implant ports, loose wires dangling from her joints. Her feet hang off the end of the bed and the blanket doesn’t cover her completely. She looks so hopelessly displaced in her old room, the circles under her eyes clashing with the pink decor – too tall, too harrowed for the lingering pre-pubescent innocence of the childhood room. Stepping back, he measures the distance between the walls: if she were to spread her wings here, they wouldn’t fit.

 

Pulling on a black coat, he goes out and drives down the city layers to buy a gun. It’s the first one he’s held in his hands since he was seventeen, surrendering the ones he carried at the security terminal departing Pandora. ”You won’t need those where you’re going!” the officer said brightly, dropping them in the incinerator shaft with the rest.

 

In civilized lands, they said, nothing can be solved with guns. Except violence is an universal language, and though it’s been ages since he last spoke it, the fluency is rooted deep in his bones. The weight of the Hyperion pistol offsets any doubts: it’s like coming home. He’s denied himself for too long, but necessity brings back the ultimate rule of survival he has learnt – do whatever it fucking takes.

 

Combining caffeine tablets with energy shots he manages the feat of staying up all night, his nerves stretched taut and ready to snap out of place. He takes the pistol apart, removes the tracking chip, re-assembles it; puts it on the table and then upon hearing the rustle of bed clothes and feet shuffling across the carpet, he hides it in the holster under his jacket.

 

Angel comes into the kitchen, wearing one of his shirts, eyes taking in the state of the apartment. ”This place is such a mess,” she says, dragging a finger over the counter before showing him the dust.

 

He doesn’t smile. ”You’re wearing my clothes.”

 

”Nothing else fits. And… Well.” She wipes the dirty finger on the rolled-up sleeve, then pulls up the side, showing off the gruesomely botched port there. ”My body is a mess. I needed something loose.”

 

”What did they do to you?”

 

Her eyes narrow, but there’s no time to go into details: the doorbell ringing makes him fly up from his seat and grasp at the concealed gun. When he opens the door, he’s greeted by mister Blake.

 

”Pleasant to see you again… John, is it? Yes, Moneta’s widower, I remember now.” He speaks in the monotonous drawl he always has, stepping right past John into the apartment where he looks around, humming as he peeks into each room. ”Ah, there we are!” he exclaims when he finds the kitchen; Angel’s leaning on the counter, keeping her tattoos angled away from view. ”Good, good.”

 

”What can I do for you, sir?” John asks, sitting down at the table, pulling out the gun underneath.

 

”Ah, nothing important. I am merely here to inform you that officially, the siren – Angel, is it? You got a little–” his finger taps against his cheek and she mirrors the motion, flicking away the smear of jam. ”There you go. Yes, as I was saying, the Hyperion Corporation terminated the siren and the projects surrounding her yesterday. Tragic loss, truly. Our deepest condolences. Hyperion will forward the usual entitlement payment.” Blake looks at them both, straightens his tie, and nods. ”Take the day off, John, you look exhausted.”

 

”W-will do, sir.”

 

”Very well. I will see you on Monday.” He turns to Angel. ”I trust this fulfills the conditions of our agreement?”

 

”It does,” she says tensely.

 

”Good. I hope to see results soon.”

 

As he leaves, both Angel and John let out a relieved gasp, and John, putting the pistol back on the table, draws in a deep breath.

 

”That went better than expected.”

 

”Hmm.” The way Angel looks at him, he can’t tell if it’s agreement or distrust. ”You seem tired. Perhaps you should sleep some.”

 

”I’ll be fine. What was that agreement he talked about?”

 

”Nothing big.”

 

”Angel.”

 

”I’ll explain it later. You really do look tired.”

 

”Not yet.” He follows her cue and drops the topic, for the moment. ”First, back to where we were: what did they do to you? Did they… Use you?”

 

”Only when I made use of them.”

 

”There was that one rat-looking boy there, who they claimed…”

 

She blushes, catching on. ”Oh god, dad, no! Nothing like that.”

 

”Good. Because if they had…”

 

”When I wanted something from them, I made them give it to me. But I never liked them that much.”

 

”So what did they do to you, then?”

 

”A lot. Mostly painful things.” She draws her shoulders up, scratching at her arms. ”Mostly I spent a lot of time thinking and seeing.”

 

”That’s it?”

 

”They kept me on a closed network,” she says with a shudder. ”It was so small and cramped, not enough room to think.”

 

”You used their servers for thinking?”

 

”Processing information.” She taps a slender index finger against her temple. ”With the augmentation to my brain, they have opened up many paths. I have kept much in here, filed it away for later.”

 

”Like?”

 

Her smile is not innocent at all: rather, it is the smile of someone who has figured out a great secret and who knows exactly the effect it will have one released. One who savors it, waiting for the perfect time. Maybe her time wasn’t so much thinking and seeing, as waiting for this moment to come back and retaliate. He puts a hand on the pistol, trying to make it look like an idle action.

 

”I don’t hate you, dad.” Her words, chosen and delivered with the greatest and cruelest care, forces him to rise abruptly from the seat.

 

”And you shouldn’t, there’s no reason to, because look, I came back, didn’t I? I had every right to leave you there, especially after everything you have done to this family!” He gesticulates, paces, voice rising and falling, eyes darting to and from her. ”The things you did were unforgivable. Ever since you were born you haven’t done anything but cause me – us! – misery. And yet, despite all this, I came back for you, because that’s what I do. That is the kind of father I am. I forgive these great atrocities you commit, and probably always will–”

 

”Dad…”

 

”Because that’s how much I care for you, sweetheart, enough to forgive you, and you can’t hate me for that, can you?”

 

Her hand on his cheek stills him. ”I don’t hate you.” Tears tinge her eyes and sadness weighs her voice down, but she slings her arms around him and hugs him without hesitation. Eyes shut, he buried his nose in her tangled hair and with one hand on the back of her neck, the other arm across her back, he pulls her closer. She somehow doesn’t smell of just rubbing alcohol and fires anymore, but also of home.

 

Two years come crashing down and he clutches at her with all his strength. She gasps once, then they’re both quiet again, locked in the tight embrace of their reunion.

 

* * *

 

 

Above the skies brighten as the long night recedes, darkness rolling back little by little as light crawls into the velvet blue space left behind. As the stars dim one by one, the dawn brings back shadows on the ground, thaws the shallow frost from the rocks, and the ambient sounds of the desert lose their ominous overtones.

 

Sitting alone on a cliff, he stokes the campfire, muscles screaming after the long and perilous climb to get there. Someone awaits him up there, hiding among the jagged ridges where they peek out at him. Winds weave between the rocks, pulling loose rags that float down in front of him – but if he turns, they will flee. It’s a test of patience, and he knows he possesses just enough to pass.

 

”So get on with it,” he says, facing the great lands before him. ”You’re obviously here to say something cryptic and mysterious, as a figment of my imagination, so do it already.”

 

”It’s not your imagination. Not completely.”

 

He knows that voice. ”Angel?”

 

”Sssh. You don’t want to ruin the mystery, do you?” He tries to turn his head around but her firm hands force him to face forward. ”As I said. Don’t ruin this.”

 

”How long has it been you?”

 

”I don’t know. We have shared these dreams for as long as I can remember. You pulled me in.”

 

”I didn’t do anything! I don’t understand these shitty dreams and–”

 

”Sssh.” In the valley below, tumbleweeds chase each other, a lone rakk screeches, and further away, something big and slow emerges, making the ground tremble. ”These dreams, this Pandora, these places… They all add up. For two years I have thought about them, sifted and analyzed, waiting for you to come back to let you know the solution.”

 

”And?”

 

”I got impatient. So I made you come back to me. But that’s not essential right now. The Vault is with you, a question you have avoided for decades. What if you answered it instead?”

 

A flash of light strikes him across the face before he can respond.

 

He wakes up screaming with a pain that sears through his entire being, a burning and throbbing ache originating from his face. When he puts his hands over it they come away dripping wet and reeking of iron, and it hurts, it hurts so bad, as if his entire body is twisting inside out, the skin peeling away. He tries to stand up but all he sees is red, blood gushing into his eyes and blurring his sight.

 

”Dad!” Her voice guides him and he stumbles toward her, arms stretched out. She catches his hands and drags him with her. ”Dad, I’m here! Calm down!”

 

She leads him across carpet and over a threshold he stubs his toe on, sitting him down on the cold tile floor of the bathroom. ”I didn’t know it would be this bad, or I–”

 

”You did this?” he seethes, trying to grab at her, but blinded as he is, all he can grasp is the air as she evades him. ”Why? After everything, after–”

 

”To make you move.” From behind, she wraps a towel around his neck. ”To soak up the blood,” she explains, then she is somehow out of his reach again. ”I won’t help you until you listen to me!”

 

”Goddammit, Angel, don’t do this to me! You can’t do this to your own father…”

 

She stops long enough so that he can find and seize her ankle, clinging desperately to her leg which radiates with a burning heat. His blood drips onto her and she sighs, struggling over to the sink to turn the water on.

 

”I made a deal with Blake to get back here, but we must act or it becomes void. This was part one. I never thought this would be the result, but it had to be done… I know things, past and present, and I see the future.”

 

”You let this happen because you think you can see the future? Okay, alright. Fine. Now fix your mess!”

 

”It’s the truth, father. The future unravels in front of me when I close my eyes, coming in bits and pieces. Fragments float up in dreams, solidify during the day, fall into place at night." She sweeps a cotton ball across the wound, flinching away when he hisses in pain. "There is only one right path for everything in which to unfold." Discarding the soaked-through cotton, she picks up another. ”I found ours. It’s been calling all along.”

 

”And what could that be?”

 

”You know very well. We both saw it in the dream, didn’t we?”

 

John stays silent as she cleans him up, the flow stilled and the blood already drying. He sees a glimpse of himself in the mirror, of a blue gash in a shape that makes a cold shudder travel down his spine.

 

”Did you make this shape?”

 

”I merely revealed that which was hidden underneath,” she says defensively, leaning back to study the damages. ”I could only have guessed at how deep it ran, but no. I didn’t know this would happen.”

 

”Liar.”

 

”I only tell truths for you.”

 

Standing up, he takes a closer look in the mirror. The left eye has been blinded, the curve of the sign narrowly missing the right while still taking out the tear duct. Otherwise there are several small cuts and abrasions, but no great wound, just the smooth scar tissue – if it can even be called that. Tracing it out with his ring finger, he feels it pulse, strange and icy, running as a deep indentation across his face. The mark of the Vault, as passed down alongside all the stories, drawn in the sands and carved into the flesh of those of weaker minds. ”So, what now?” he asks over his shoulder.

 

”We heed it. The Vault’s call. Perhaps, at the end of the road, we will find a way to purge this obsession from you. Perhaps we will find a way to happiness.” She tapes gauze into place over his cheeks and forehead. ”What do we have to lose at this point, anyway?”

 


	4. Chapter 4

 

 

Angel turns the handheld PDA over, her touch tinged with a crackle of static electricity. ”So small… You have any idea how massive it is to be inside of them? All that space which you can fill up, delete, re-write, overwrite. I felt like a goddess in there but out here, my accomplishments seem so insignificant.”

 

”So make them big.” John takes it from her hands and puts it down on the table, where it unfolds a map of Pandora; she puts her hand forward and digs into the holographic projection with her fingers, expanding it to surround them.

 

”They only gave you access to so much information about Pandora,” she says, her tattoos glowing as she reaches out and touches her fingers together. When they part, four new points are highlighted. ”There are actually four Pandora projects. All of them covering different aspects. Hyperion thought it would lessen the risk of madness in the personnel.”

 

”Did it.”

 

”You’re the only sane one left.”

 

”Good on me. So. Just a matter of hacking their computers and copying the information?”

 

”That would be the easy and straight-forward path, yes, but… What we need to do is get to the source.”

 

”What will that accomplish?”

 

”So much.”

 

Considering that they really have nothing else left to lose, he follows her markers, putting his faith in that she has truly seen the right path for them. She holds the map of their futures, but he’s the one who makes it happen. He pieces together equipment, rescued from the corporation dump and store-bought, spending all his nights on getting it to function. Angel sleeps during the day, rising when he returns home. She kisses his cheek and he hugs her, but always asks: ”Are you sure this will work?”

 

And she, without fail, beams up at him, nodding. ”I have seen it. Yes.”

 

On a weekend he travels to Pandora alone, with barely enough time to install two tracking devices. The first one in New Haven he finds easily, Hyperion having failed to be subtle about where they place things. Though the frustrating little Claptrap fights him and strangely enough starts having a panic attack, no one seems to care. As usual. Tuning in to the radio broadcasts upon heading north, he catches up on the changes, noting how many old settlements have fallen to crazed bandits marking their insanity by the Vault symbol.

 

If he thinks back hard enough, he remembers a time when things were less complicated, before they all came to Pandora with eyes lit up searching for fate, but all that found them was misery. Grandmother stayed and made him stay too.

 

Then he found his way back to Tantalus, but the house he grew up in there was torn down. He got a job and met…

 

And fast-forward, he realizes there’s no point caring about where the past took him, only where the future can take him. Towards the Vault, and to somehow find a way past the madness that threatens to engulf anyone who wants it. The stories are all real, that’s the worst thing: each bandit that put the iron to their face and burnt the symbol into their flesh, that gazed too deep into the mysteries and came away with nothing but a broken mind; the ancient alien constructs, the mysteries – he has to accept them all as a real, because Angel has told him to. ”It’s not just stories. This legend is ultimately true. And we’ll make it come true.”

 

On Hyperion Core, the legend is just that, a legend and a myth, something to crack wise about around the office. On Pandora’s soil, however, it’s as real as the scarred moon and the scorched earth. The mandated Hyperion emblem, worn by employees as a sign of corporate ownership, is unpinned and hidden.

 

Wrapped in a scarf he drives across the arid lands, charting the history between his departure and return. The second device he puts in the Rust Commons, the roving bandit gangs failing to notice him due to the intense storm lashing at the dilapidated structures. Sand gets in his eyes; on the transport ship back to Hyperion Core, he stands in the cramped bathroom and washes his mouth over and over, the dust swirling down the drain.

 

Angel crackles with energy when he comes back, her palms on a screen. She parts them and lets him see how far she’s tapped into the electronic infrastructure in New Haven, though her mere ghostly presence in their system overloads the faulty wiring more than once. He kisses her cheek, hugs her tight, and doesn’t tell her he’s proud of her because it’s what she is meant to be doing anyway.

 

Then half-way through the work week, Angel contacts him at his job.

 

” _I know what we must do_ ,” she says, her face floating between lines on his computer, voice filling up the headphones. ” _We need to break through Atlas security_.”

 

**W H Y.**

 

Slumping back, he rubs his face and groans. It’s an impossible feat. Spelling it out, he takes his time, knowing she is impatient as much as she knows he’s dragging it out because he just doesn’t believe her. Not yet. She works hard to make him believe in her, and she’s slowly succeeding because no matter what reservations he has or doubts that linger, she is right, painfully so.

 

” _Atlas Corporation controls the ECHOnet. The ECHOnet is the key to seeing all of Pandora… Or as much of it as we can at once._ ”

 

”What do you mean?” he asks the very same night, sliding the plug into her implant port. She’s chewing on the dinner frantically, trying to finish it before he turns on the equipment, a smear of pesto staining her pale lips. ”As much as we can see at once?”

 

”Dahl instated the policy of denying bandit access to the ECHOnet, which Atlas has maintained. They have taken sizable holdings, and…” She pauses, swallows, makes a face. ”That is a different matter. First we need to gain access.”

 

”And how were you planning to do that?”

 

”We travel to Pandora.”

 

He grimaces at the thought of going back again. ”Look, getting through Atlas security is impossible, they’re infamous for the anti-hacking measures. Besides, if I tried it and got caught, Hyperion would be implicated, and that’s our only source of income right now.”

 

”You’re not going to hack it. I am.” She puts down the plate and flips the switch herself. ”It’ll be easy.”

 

”What?”

 

”Take me with you to Pandora.”

 

He kneels in front of her, clutching her hands. ”Sweetheart, I can’t risk that. You don’t understand how dangerous Pandora is, how vicious the inhabitants are… Anything but this. We’ll find another way.”

 

”This is how it will go, dad.”

 

While Angel’s eyelids tremble as she skims through the network, he won’t let go of her hands despite the static shocks passing between their fingers. The scars above her eyebrows are fading and the circles under her eyes filling in, yet he can’t bring himself to say yes. Instead he tears the cord out and shuts off the equipment, kicking over a chair. It’s a big of a no as he can dare give her.

 

That night, Pandora beckons in his nightmares. He wakes up in a cold sweat, tasting cactus juice on his tongue and hearing the skags clawing at the walls trying to get in. Taking a caffeine shot, he opts to wait out the night awake with only a book as company.

 

_Don’t resist fate._ Angel leaves messages, scrawling them across any screen he passes and erasing them the second anyone else dares a glance. Screens fill up with images of Pandora, of the old Dahl advertisements branding Pandora as the new settlement of the future. _There is no place like Pandora!_ He knows as much, because he spent all too much of his life there. He fought for his life, at home and outside, until he took all the money and left without any remorse. Having returned once is more than enough.

 

_Pandora calls! Will you answer?_

 

And still there are secrets buried deep in her festering heart, kept tucked away yet shallow enough to fracture thousands of minds. You come to Pandora only if you are resigned to the fate she bestows upon her residents, the price one pays.

 

_What we are able to do, together, will change everything_.

 

”What will change, Angel?” he asks, foregoing the usual greetings when he comes home. She stands in the hall, sleepy-eyed with socks bunching up around her ankles. ”What will actually change from what we’re doing? Give me something.”

 

She cups his face between her delicate cold hands, the dry palms sounding like paper as she rubs them against his stubbled cheek. ”If we answer the question Pandora asks, we can change ourselves. We can change Pandora. The galaxy. There’s no end to it.”

 

Faith – such a fickle thing, an essence of each person that comes and goes at the oddest whims, asking much and taking more, and giving far less. Yet Angel holds the flame and pushes it into his chest with all her might. Where everything was lost in the wake of their bloodied hands tearing things apart, suddenly it comes rushing back, as if it’d been waiting for him all along. He laughs and picks her up, and in the surprise of it all her wings sprout out, the tips burning the wall.

 

”You truly are my little miracle,” he says, and she beams down at him. It’s the happiest their little family unit has ever been.

 

* * *

 

 

”Don’t look at anyone,” John says as they disembark, fiddling with the latches that keep his new mask in place. ”Don’t talk to anyone. Just avoid everyone here but me, okay? I’ll do all the talking and you just… Stay silent and keep back.”

 

Angel’s arm goes up to shield her eyes from the harsh light, the sleeve falling down and giving a glimpse of her tell-tale tattoos to anyone passing. He yanks at her wrist, pulling the sleeve down. ”And definitely don’t do that!”

 

She says nothing, but when he struggles with the vending machine to get a new gun and supplies for their journey she just puts her hand to the surface and out comes everything he wants. He tells her, again, not to use her powers so publicly. When the vehicle station gives him problems she runs her finger along the side, and for a second her wings expand and diminish. He nearly breaks her arm with his iron grip. Her eyelashes become heavy with tears but she doesn’t whimper, just climbs into the car and unfolds the map, shouting directions at him over the howling wind.

 

Their journey is long, across the Deep Fathoms and broken highways. Concrete juts out over dried-out lakes, ones he remember fishing and swimming in during the winter – with the water gone, different monsters have taken their place, the crystal-clear blue vanished to reveal sand dunes and mines from abandoned mini-wars. When Angel nods off he pulls over at a sleazy roadside bar. No one asks if she’s legal since there is no legal age, and Angel scoots into the corner of a red leather booth. They take turns sleeping, pretending to sip from beer bottles while dripping it down a crack in the floor.

 

 When he goes to get a new one, the barkeep slips him a card with a wink. ”Keep me in mind,” she says. 

 

”I’ll try.” 

 

”I’d be awfully sad if you forgot.” She pouts a little, then leans over the counter, peeking at where Angel’s sleeping. ”Your daughter, right?”

 

”Just give me another beer already.”

 

If she’s annoyed, she doesn’t show it. ”As you wish, sugar.” 

 

They continue the journey the next morning, Angel letting the protective wrappings around her face fall as she leans back and soaks up the sunlight with closed eyes. There is nothing to talk about, the road straight and the Crimson Lance presence everywhere.

 

At the first roadblock they come across, John shrinks back into his seat, reaching for the pistol in his holster as two heavily armored soldiers approach.

 

”No civilians,” one says, shouldering his assault rifle. ”Turn back.”

 

”We have, uh, business,” John tries, but his stuttering delivery doesn’t win them over.

 

”Oh yeah? What kind of business?”

 

Thinking ’fuck it’, he grasps for the pistol, but Angel puts a hand over his. ”Dad…” 

 

”And who’s this?” The other soldier hoists himself up on the side of the car, pushing at the scarf Angel wears over her head. ”Your daughter? Guess she takes after her mother.”

 

Angel takes him by the wrist, forcing his hand away. ”Don’t touch me.”

 

”You heard her.”

 

”You’re the ones intruding on Atlas territory.”

 

It starts with a change in the atmosphere, the air around them so charged that the hairs on his arms stand straight up. The soldier who persisted with touching Angel sputters, a garbled noise coming out of his helmet.

 

”What the hell are you doing to him?” The other soldier circles around the car, only to freeze and start convulsing. 

 

Angel, eyes glowing, speaks with a voice so deep and distant it gives John shivers. ”Dad… You might want to run.”

 

He hauls himself out of the driver’s seat and starts off down the road, looking back over his shoulder. An electric storm rises, lightning arcs bouncing between Angel’s hands and bouncing off the soldiers to the car.

 

”Angel!” The car goes up in an explosion, flames rising up. He dodges a wheel that flies at him, but nonetheless rushes back. Flaming bits of wreckage are strewn all over the road, among them pieces of human bodies, charred and indistinguishable. When the metal burns his hands he kicks at the pieces until they part, and there he finds Angel. She’s unharmed, bright eyes, but the cloth covering her tattoos has burnt off. Picking her up he carries her out of there, pressing her face to his chest. ”Don’t ever do that!” he shouts over the crackling fires, seeking shelter in the shade of a withering tree. ”Do you hear me? Don’t ever. Do. That. Again.”

 

”I’m fine.” She smiles. ”That was kind of fun.”

 

”Don’t you ever do that again.” John hears his voice hitching and punches the tree so hard that a piece of bark pierces his skin. ”Please.”

 

Her smile fades and she apologizes. ”I promise, I won’t.” They say nothing else during the stay, breaking into the base and leaving a bloodied trail. Angel only needs to touch the central ECHO computer and John plant the micro-tracker, and then they depart far quieter than they arrived.

 

Back on Hyperion Core, their project enters a new and far more intense phase, dampened only by one little souvenir from Pandora: Angel’s burnt skin. Red welts and blisters swell up, leading to such an intense sensitivity that she, normally used to pain, cannot do anything. She constantly reeks of aloe vera, her sticky skin slathered each time she wakes up. The sheets cling to her and she ties them around her neck, saying that the hemlines of clothes hurt too much. When he touches her she screams outright.

 

He thinks the pain should deter her from Pandora, but she immediately starts planning another trip. When he says no they descend into a quiet and passive-aggressive war of wills which he wins by Friday night. ”Angel,” he says, shifting the intonation and delivery in ways he know will tug at her heartstrings, ”sweetheart, I have been on the edge of losing you so many times, the idea of risking your life in any way makes me feel like I’m dying. Look at me. I would never be able to live if you died. Do you understand? I will go through hell three times over before I risk you again, you hear?”

 

She sighs, teary-eyed, and gives in. ”I guess I have enough right now. There’s just one more thing…”

 

The risks he goes through for their future.

 

Hyperion’s Orbital Observation Organization sits on the eighty-eight floor of the massive skyscraper, and John circles around the floor during his lunch hour, pretending he’s looking for someone. He gains a few glances for the mask he wears, but it’s better than the other option – the Vault sign is far too recognizable. And rather hideously deforming. Catching sight of himself in the window reflection, he stops to admire himself for a second. He doesn’t actually look half bad. The mask adds… Something, a _je ne sais quoi_ , but he likes what he sees. A better self that stares back him, that smiles with confidence. The better John he yearns to be.

 

Staking out a path and surreptitiously placing a handful of trackers around at key points, he heads down and starts monitoring and waiting. Three hours after the last person files out of his desk grid, there is only one person left up on Orbital.

 

**> You’re late.**

 

**Taking care of business.**

 

Her face flickers by on his screen.

 

**> Hmm. Need some help?**

 

**Hit me.**

 

**> There. There’s no surveillance feed anymore, and I’m currently fabricating tape of you leaving the building. Go on and do it again.**

 

On his way up, he wonders what exactly she meant. As he uses the chain of his pocket-watch, sneaking up behind the young intern working overtime, he reckons it has to do with her sight. Yes, he decides, dropping the dead body out through a window as the thick evening mists shroud his actions, she’s seen _something_.

 

”What, exactly, did you mean?” he asks of her as he washes his hands – no blood, but the nauseating scent of the intern’s perfume stick to him.

 

”It’s not like you haven’t done this before.” She sits on the edge of the bathtub, filling it up with steaming hot water for him. Skimming her hand over the water, she pulls back sharply when a stray drop hits too close to the ports on her arms.

 

”Of course. Just, one thing.” With an icy stare, he manages to fix her gaze in the mirror. ”I did it all for you. That’s important to remember. Another thing… Don’t go digging in the past.”

 

”Do you think it’s that unpleasant?”

 

”You should think so too.” Removing his mask, he groans – the scar may have healed, but the pain lingers on. She nods, getting up to get out of the room. ”Honey? The satellite should be in orbit in two days.”

 

”Thanks.”

 

”Be ready.”

 

* * *

 

 

They start on a weekend morning, drinking coffee and carefully nibbling croissants as Angel flicks through countless passenger manifests of travelers to Pandora.

 

”Why not a native?” John asks, stifling a yawn.

 

”A native either believes fully or not at all,” she says distractedly. ”There’s no room for suggestion or curiosity to be piqued.” She slurps at the coffee, too loud for his liking. ”Here. I think I’ll try this one.” Immediately her eyes take on an eerie glow, lips still as the computer echoes her distorted voice.

 

_”Listen. The Vault is no mere legend, but a truth we will find together. Listen to me, follow my command, and I will lead you to it.”_

 

The man, appearing on camera, immediately puts a gun to his temple and shoots himself.

 

”Bad start.” John empties his cup and puts it down with a clatter. ”You’re too harsh.”

 

”What would you have me say then?”

 

”Something smoother, less demanding and more… Mysterious. You’ve got to live up to the mythology.”

 

Angel nods, undefeated and undeterred. It takes her all day to find the right tone, cycling through a dozen people as she tries over and over without losing hope. He offers suggestions – ” _no, no, not like that, here: ’I am here to help you’. You have to act like you are there to be their friend, their help, that you serve them instead of the other way around!_ ” – and she complies. Half of them go insane, the other half resort to drinking and shouting to get her out of their heads. She’s still muttering commands as he disconnects her and carries her to bed, drawing the covers up to her chin.

 

Taking a look around her room, he notes how she has changed it in the weeks since her liberation: all markers of the younger Angel are gone. No toys remain, no cute stickers on the door and the mirror turned to face the wall. Instead the surfaces are cluttered up with wires and cotton wads, rubbing alcohol and salt solutions. All the things he salvaged in their mad escape have been thrown out… Except for the chess set. It sits alone on top of her dresser, all the pieces in position of their last game. Dust has settled in thick layers on top of it, and he picks up the white queen to blow some off. Her favorite piece, all her strategies formed around it even when it would lead to her fall once he figured it out.

 

Putting it down, he looks around again. That Angel is long gone. From what he sees in the window, so is that John as well.

 

* * *

 

 

”How are they doing?” He leans over her shoulder, staring intently at the screen.

 

”They have not made much progress, sir.”

 

”Do you think they will?”

 

”Only two weeks have passed, there’s still a chance–”

 

”Then ditch them. Find some new prospects. If these mercenary scumbags can’t even pick themselves together long enough to stay on track, then there’s no need for them at all.”

 

The screens die abruptly, ending the video feed. He pinches the bridge of his nose, pouring a glass for himself.

 

”Talk to me. Why is this taking so long? All we need is for them to not die in five minutes but some have even failed that. How is this happening?”

 

”It’s hard to–”

 

”Angel. Remember what we talked about.”

 

Blowing at the fringe hanging down in sweaty strips across her forehead, she glares up at him. ”With all due respect, _sir_ , but this equipment isn’t good enough.”

 

”This is premium, have you seen the specs? I’ve spent all the money we have on this and you’re claiming it’s not up to your lofty standards?” He raises his hand in exasperation, noticing only too late the surge. Two screens and a server blow out, sending a spattering of glass and ash over the desk.

 

”That was me working at the capacity necessary to achieve what must be done.” Throwing a fried-out motherboard at him for emphasis, she scowls. ”It’s not enough.”

 

”Then what do you want, huh?”

 

”Something better. Hyperion–”

 

”No.”

 

”–You could sneak me into the office and–”

 

”Angel…”

 

”No, dad, you listen to me. We can either dither about here for months, years, without achieving results, or we can play a risky hand and win within the week. It’s your choice.”

 

Slamming the glass down on the table he marches out, pulling the coat rack clean and going back to throw it at Angel’s feet. ”Cover yourself. This is going to end bad, and when it does, I want you to remember that it was your idea.”

 

”I know. And you tried to talk me out of it.” She buttons the trench-coat up to her neck.

 

Though Angel works the cameras and assures him no record of their passing will exist, he hurries her along. They find an office, unused for quite some time, and set about transferring any equipment they can into it. At midnight, they settle down and Angel jumps right back in, glued to the screen that bathes her in a pale glow. John sits with a bottle by the door, alert at every sound of a passing cleaning bot. He thumbs the chain of his pocket-watch, bouncing his feet in nervous agitation.

 

”Well?” he says at the end of the night, one hand on her shoulder.

 

”Nothing tonight, but… This is so much better. More space, more freedom, more room to think.”

 

”That’s great and all, but we got to go. The offices will be opening in a few hours and we can’t get caught here.”

 

”You go. I’m staying.”

 

”What? No!” He pulls her to her feet and puts the long coat on her shoulders. ”Your little gamble tonight paid off, but I am not risking anything more than this.”

 

”Dad, if I stay, I’ll be able to keep a closer eye on Pandora. You will be around during the day anyway, and I can handle myself at night.”

 

”No no no, honey, you don’t understand…” He runs a hand through his hair, scratches at his neck, and then pulls at her arms. ”We’re leaving, you’re going home to where you are safe and sound, because there are variables, there are people here, I can’t… I can’t protect you.”

 

Shrugging out of the coat, she stands on her tip-toes and kisses his cheek. ”It’s okay, dad. You chose not to protect me for a long while as well. I managed then, I can manage now.”

 

As he stoops down to hug her tight, so tight that she gasps, he whispers: ”You’re hurting my love for you. Is that what you want? Making me love you a bit less? That’s how bad you’re hurting me, Angel.” Then he leaves, reluctantly, looking back one time too many, to see her nervous hand-wringing as she puts things in order, his words having had an obvious effect on her.

 

* * *

 

 

**> Could you bring me some food?**

 

**What do we say?**

 

**> Please, sir. I’m really hungry.**

 

He pushes the chair out and goes to the vending machine, grabbing two bottles of soda and half a dozen different snacks that he brings to her. She eyes the haul wearily, unwrapping one bar as she sniffs and grimaces. ”What’s wrong with it?” he asks acidly, and she takes a bite.

 

”I’m just getting tired of sugar and processed food. I’d like something fresh.”

 

”There’s an apple there for you.”

 

”Something more sustaining.”

 

”Look, if you’re not awake at lunch hour, then how am I supposed to know what you want? I can’t just walk out and get you take-out at this time, can I?”

 

”No…” She swallows the bite and washes it down with a hearty gulp of the orange soda. ”Nothing else to report, _sir_.”

 

”If that is your idea of being a rebellious teenager, it’s going to get real old real fast. Calling me sir… Kinda weak, don’t you think? I mean, I personally like the title, so what are you even making a point about?” The glare she gives him makes him laugh so hard his eyes tear up. ”You’re too cute, darling. Now get back to work. I want what is in that Vault, and I want it sooner than you’re giving it to me.”

 

”Why won’t you just go there yourself?” It’s a question she has never asked, but there is a certain rage in her, an anger he has pushed far enough for her to almost snap.

 

”And leave you? Look at yourself, you’re just a teenage kid who can barely fend for herself. I can’t, with good conscience, leave you here nor take you with me to Pandora.” 

 

Even if he kept his tone even and nice, he slams the door hard when he leaves, and strings out bringing her a dinner until she’s apologizing and calling him dad. Of course, she reverts back to ’sir’ the minute she’s full, and they spiral back into their passive-aggressive tactics. Well, hers are, his are merely a just retribution to childish behavior she really ought to have outgrown by now. ”I thought you were better than this,” he says, and her lower lip trembles as she turns away and tries to make the newest group of vault hunters obey her commands.

 

Of course, they fail, and by extension, she fails him too. 

 

**You’re good, but not good enough.**

 

**> I am trying my hardest!**

 

**Are you?**

 

Having pushed it far enough, he stands facing a massive silence from her. She refuses the food he brings her, averts her gaze and avoids his touch, calling him sir dutifully. All she lives for is what is on the wall of screens they’ve set up, upon which the lives she has taken under her wing are displayed. At most, she pulls the strings of twenty-five people at once, moving and shifting them across Pandora as if they were pieces on a chessboard, pitting the weaker against the strongest and keeping her own mess neatly contained.

 

All the while, he keeps an eye on her. When she collapses from exhaustion, he comes around and puts her down on the makeshift bed set up in the corner, injecting balancers so she’ll recover faster. He spares her pain and suffering by pushing her into achieving – the more she gives up of herself, the more they gain.

 

”I adore you, darling,” he whispers in her ear as she sleeps. That’s all the encouragement she gets.

 

It pays off.

 

On a Sunday morning he gets a frantic message, and he hauls himself through the sluggish weekend traffic to the office where he finds her eagerly bouncing in the seat. ”These four ones, I think – no, _I know_ that they are the right ones.”

 

”And?” Not that he’s skeptical of her – when she is right, she’s one hundred percent spot on – but she looks so disheveled and borderline asleep that he doesn’t fully trust in her judgement.

 

She leans forward in the seat, hands pressed together. ”I just… I don’t know what to say, and I needed…”

 

”Go on.”

 

”I needed your help,” she admits unwillingly. ”What do I tell these ones?”

 

Squeezing her shoulder, he leans close to study the monitor. There’s a slight shiver passing through her body, and her teeth chatters from the cold. ”Here. ’Don’t be alarmed. I need you to stay calm and don’t let on that anyone is talking to you. Start making your way off the bus.’”

 

”The bus is still moving, sir.”

 

”Shut up, honey, and just–”

 

The door swings open, John snapping straight up. He fiddles with his tie, tries to say something but fails. Mister Tassiter shoots him down with a glare that makes John tremble. ”I thought I saw you skulking around here. Is this Project Pandora? Is this why you’ve dispatched a satellite to that godforsaken planet?”

 

”Well, uh, sir, the instruments I kept at home, they–”

 

Tassiter grunts. ”Like I told you before, John: shut it down. I want both of you out of here within thirty minutes.”

 

”Yes, sir. Of course. Will do.”

 

Angel sits hunched over the desk, but when Tassiter is gone her eyes snap open, a scowl on her face. ”He thinks too little of you.”

 

”Yeah, well, I have nothing to show for all of this yet, do I?”

 

”Soon.”

 

He begins to unplug the equipment and pack it up, but she sits there with arms crossed, mulling something over. Finally he snaps at her. ”What?”

 

”Why don’t you kill him?”

 

”That’s… Not a practical or feasible solution right now…”

 

”Isn’t it?” Sucking on the inside of her cheek, she gets up and circles around to him. ”How about you threaten him at least? Just a little? Keep him away?”

 

”Honey, no.”

 

”It’s efficient.”

 

”Yeah, and you need to learn how corporate murder works when you’re in a position like I am. Now help me pack up or I swear…”

 

* * *

 

 

They know the new group is the right one when the gang of misfits accidentally kills three older, discarded groups. Angel in particular develops a deep fascination for the siren among them. John himself grows weirdly interested in Roland, the grizzled soldier carrying his defection from the Crimson Lance like a poorly concealed scar. The siren and the soldier, the only ones he find truly threatening, because the sniper and the berserker are ones Angel assures him she’d be able to snap in two – mentally – if the need would arise. ”They’re easy enough – sink the hooks in and tear them out,” she says with a wave of her hand.

 

”And the siren? The soldier?”

 

”That might solve itself in due time.” But she’s not one hundred percent sure on that.

 

Blowing the last of his savings and selling off their possessions, he manages to create a large enough network in her bedroom for her to work with. Due to her ecstatic mood and constant connection, he has to tape the windows with black paper to prevent the risk of anyone seeing her odd light shows. Sometimes it blinds him to even enter, but he never fears for her or the lives she holds in her hand. Her manipulation has reached such a skilled level that he can only sit by and admire it.

 

Where she needs them to go, utilizing information she’s gathered from the buzzing whispers on the ECHOnet, she tells them to go. They move into position and strike, acting like the perfect pawns, eliminating piece by piece, tearing down resistance by resistance as they peel away at the obstacles Pandora has put into place. Not even the land itself can oppose their onslaught, their boots constantly soaked in blood and guns blazing as bullets chip away at any who dares to oppose them. They even start buying into the myth she’s crafting them into. 

 

She might as well say dance, and they’d do it.

 

One night she emerges from her cocoon of wires and humming computer fans, reach for a blanket on the couch to wrap herself in and sit down on the other end of the couch. Since he sold their entertainment system to buy stronger electronics that can withstand her power surges, he’s resorted to reading during the evenings.

 

”Taking a break?” he asks without putting down the book.

 

”They’re sleeping. I thought…” She pulls her knees up under her chin, ten tiny toes peeking out under the blanket. ”Maybe you could…”

 

”Spit it out.”

 

”If we could do something. Together.” Instantly she shakes her head. ”No, I’m sorry, I don’t know, of course you’re busy.”

 

”I am.”

 

”Yes, of course, I’m just going to make myself something to eat.”

 

”But… Come here.”

 

Scooting closer, he puts his arm around her and pulls her close. Cautiously she leans her head against his chest, and he angles the book so that she can read it as well.

 

”I remember this,” she says. ”Keats. You were reading it that day…”

 

”Your powers manifested, yes. You have an amazing tendency to interrupt me right as I’m reaching the best parts. Here.” His finger taps against a line. ”Now be silent and keep up.”

 

She nestles against him, fingers clutching at his shirt, their eyes moving across the sentences, both silent, both warming up to the other ever so little.

 

* * *

 

 

It’s a regular Wednesday night that it happens. Upon coming home he hears Angel’s voice from the room, door ajar, the electric sparks crawling over every surface. It’s a speech she’s reciting, neat and precise, practiced from the way she never hesitates and delivered with sharp precision. He catches a few stray sentences as he hangs off his jacket, puts down the briefcase and slips out of the shoes.

 

In the room itself, she sits with both hands pressed to the screen, a blissful expression her face. ” _Now go. You have done well_.” 

 

He removes her hands and sees it: the Vault, opened. The camera zooms in to show snow spattered with blood, the key deactivated in the arms of Brick, Lilith attending to a cut on Roland’s forehead, her own hands shaking.

 

”And what was in there?” he asks, unable to keep his voice from trembling.

 

”Possibilities that are already appearing in abundance,” she says, stifling a yawn. ”Here, a new element springing forth in mines all across Pandora.”

 

”Yes, but…”

 

”An ancient terror.”

 

”And?” He insists, clutching at the back of her chair. ”What else, Angel?”

 

”That was it. The rest will come.”

 

Putting his hands on her shoulder, he squeezes them so hard she cries out. ”’ _I am possessed of a sight that allows me to look forward and backward along the timeline._ ’ You said that to them. What does it even mean?”

 

”Exactly what I said.” He snaps a small bone and she starts sobbing for real. ”Dad, I know it doesn’t look like much now, hear me out… It will be!”

 

”How.” His voice is like ice, his hands the iron vise crushing her for delivering him nothing: no answers, no glories, no riches, just… A dead monster built of tentacles and teeth and fleshy lumps. Nothing else. Disappointment doesn’t even begin to describe it. ”How will this be anything.”

 

”I’ve seen it!” she shrieks, another bone snapping under his hands. ”I saw us… As the Vault opened, a vision… Light… But you and I, we’re…”

 

”We’re what, honey? Don’t stutter, it doesn’t become you.”

 

”Pandora! We can rule Pandora!”

 

 He lets go. Slumping back, she rolls her head from side to side as she tries not to cry openly. ”Soon, anyway. But the immediate task is completed. There. I gave you the Vault. Soon I’ll be able to give you more.”

 

They gaze at each other for a long time – Angel too exhausted to move, John too overwhelmed by what is crashing down upon him: everything he ever wanted, right in the palm of his hand, and it turns out to be nothing.

 

As Angel compiles information and makes an appointment with mister Blake, John retires with a bottle of whiskey to his bedroom. If despair is a pit, he opens it up himself that night and goes down deep. With each sip, he thinks it over, trying to stay calm and rational, but one thought keeps coming back: it’s not enough. The Vault held nothing and Angel… She makes a promise, but how well can she keep it?

 

The alcohol burns his throat, but it’s a fire that leaves only ashes. He can’t do anything with an empty Vault. It’s just not enough for him.

 

There has to be something more. Something he can’t see, but… She can.

 

It’s late when he enters her bedroom and shakes her awake. She whimpers, her shoulders still sore and bruises starting to blossom in purple formations on them, but he ignores that. ”Angel, what do you think? What future do you see for us?”

 

She blinks. ”You’ll be the hero.” As if one second gives her the time she needs to see what is to come.

 

”But how do you–”

 

”Have I lied to you once yet?”

 

”No.”

 

”Have I ever been unfaithful to your dreams?”

 

”No.”

 

”Then trust me in this too. I tell you nothing but the truth: you will conquer. Pandora will tremble under your hand.”

 

”And what about you?”

 

”I’ll be your daughter, your shadow, your sword, just as I already am.”

 

He muses on it, plays with the idea: yes, he can imagine it too. A crazed grin spreads across his face.

 

She clambers out of bed and takes him back to his, but instead of leaving she sits down at his bedside. ”When was the last time you dreamt?” she asks, loosening the mask from his face.

 

”I don’t remember. Does it matter?”

 

”Not much. Let me show you something, though.”

 

Tapping the handheld computer on his bedside table, she scoots up the bed, propping a pillow behind her. As she focuses, the screen flickers away from the menu and instead becomes something close to a video feed, yet all too crisp and perfect. ”This was the dream you interrupted.”

 

It’s Pandora – drenched in sunlight, with brilliant glass structures glimmering in the distance. Angel stands on a cliff with her wings spread wide, shade over her head and John by her side. They don’t speak, don’t touch, arms crossed as they gaze out at their handiwork. The landscape transforms in front of them, cracking and breaking, but the commotion calms down and the lands are suddenly tranquil and beautiful.

 

He thinks he could stand a Pandora like that, but there’s a shadow skittering across the horizon. He points at it and Angel takes his hand, holding it between hers as she shakes her head. The video ends.

 

”That’s what I can give you. Is it good enough?”

 

He takes her hand and kisses the knuckles. ”You’ve made me a proud father. I love it, sweetheart.”

 

She turns her face away and though he can’t see it, he hears the choked sob and doubtlessly, the accompanying tears. He strokes her back and she winces, but says nothing else.

 

* * *

 

 

”Excellent,” mister Blake says as he goes over the report Angel put in front of him. She rolls up the overly long sleeves of her jacket, blinking out at the harsh morning light as an irregular crack opens up in the clouds, letting down a shaft of sun that hits the passing cars and bounces back into their eyes. ”Very good.”

 

”You can see it’s all there,” she says, hands folded in her lap. ”All within the timeframe you gave me.”

 

”Indeed. You delivered, and more. Hyperion will move on this opportunity, I am sure of that.”

 

Angel elbows John, who jumps in his seat, glaring at her before clearing his throat. ”I should spearhead that,” John says. ”I mean, the Pandora thing.”

 

Blake considers it, then nods. ”Perhaps. You are probably the most knowledgable on the issue here, after all, and let it never go said that Hyperion does not reward a good successful initiative.” He stands to shake John’s hand. ”We’ll have to go draft up some contracts, of course, and there are other formalities to deal with. You might want to take your daughter home.”

 

”Will do, sir.”

 

”I see you got what you wanted from this deal,” Blake comments to Angel in passing.

 

She shakes her head, refusing to answer. In the car, she chews on her lips until they break, staring straight out the window.

 

”Come on,” John says, nudging her chin up. ”You should be smiling!”

 

She attempts one, a trickle of blood coming down across her lower lip. He sighs in disgust and wipes the red drops away, but still she looks as miserable as before.

 

”Sweetheart, please. It’s not like I am about to sign away your life forever, is it?”

 

Angel leans back. ”We will have each other, at least.” Her tone is flat, resigned, and her eyes empty.

 

”See! You’re starting to look at it in a positive light now!” The way she turns her face away sends a cold shiver down his spine, and he almost wants to force her to look at him, to make her smile, to make her say they will be okay, but he doesn’t want to know what she has seen to change her mind so suddenly. And after all, she’s just his strange little daughter, and he’s the father; she might see where they are going, but he is the one who will bring them there, who will prevent any disaster she thinks she might have caught a glimpse of. ”I promise,” he says, stroking her cheek, ”no one else will ever hurt you again. It’ll just be you and me, changing everything.”


	5. Chapter 5

 

It’s not that he forgets about her, just that staying still long enough to talk to her becomes near impossible once the whirlwind gets started. Hyperion has always prided itself on being a company that rewards competence among its ranks, and what John uncovers turns him into an overnight star. The new poster boy, the new ideal of a go-getter spirit, perpetuated by the PR department that seeks to reinvent him from the desktop slave he used to be. It’s easy to go along with because it is a change he wants, and he smiles wide, winks at ladies, walks with a new swagger. He starts wearing the mask daily, because he has become someone and he wants them to think he looks good. No, _he looks good_ , and he wants them to know it.

 

The rest is just mere icing: the overhaul, the rise among the ranks, the money streaming in. John is a name for old men stumbling on their own canes, a PR associate points out, and Jack… Jack’s fresh, spirited, new. He agrees, and he becomes his better self, the man he knew he could be all those years. He just didn’t know the way then.

 

They move into a luxury condo, Angel transported into it while hiding in a cargo crate that he only opens when they’re alone.

 

”I hate having to be officially dead,” she complains as she climbs out, rubbing at her shoulders. Her knitted top snags on the nails and rips, and she gives out a low cry as the nail’s edge touches against an exposed augment.

 

He handles her with the utmost care, freeing her from the unravelling jumper and covers her with his blazer as she stands shivering in the cool apartment. ”It’s for your–”

 

”–Own best, I know.” A heavy sigh. ”I had a look at my grave yesterday.”

 

”Did you like it?”

 

”A lot of white marble. And no flowers. No one is mourning me.”

 

”I’ll order a thousand roses for you. And what does it matter anyway? You’re alive, here, with me.”

 

”Mother’s grave has–”

 

”Ssh. We don’t have to speak of that.”

 

Still she pushes his hand away from her mouth. ”Are you done missing her?”

 

”Honey,” he says tersely, pushing her into the room, ”I think you’ll find everything to your liking here.” Slamming the door shut after himself, he shakes his head, and immediately goes to order for floral arrangements to be put on Angel’s empty grave. He hesitates, then, against his own liking, orders one for Moneta, specifying that it comes with an attached banner that reads _From your loving killer_.

 

It’s not that he neglects her, he’s just very busy and he knows she can take care of herself. With all the computers and the Pandora satellite still in orbit, she oversees the initial movements of Hyperion staking out territory on the desolate planet. He has, as always, other things to do, arranging for their own move there.

 

It’s a given with the job: they have to go to Pandora, but he stalls, hanging on to something he can’t even name anymore. He should be there, of course he should – it’s just a taste at the back of his throat, a sharp spike behind his left eye. Taking care to avoid the matter, even with Angel who presses the issue when he does sit down to eat with her, he manages to get a whole year to pass. There’s always one task or another to keep a man on Hyperion Core.

 

Except one day, he can’t string it out any further. It’s a small betrayal – the ones that hurt the worst.

 

Angel sits by the computers as usual, screens trained on… ”Still not letting go of the vault hunters, huh?” he says, leaning over her shoulder.

 

”They are discussing me!” she says eagerly.

 

”Why are you still in touch with them?”

 

”I, uh, they grew on me.”

 

”Huh.”

 

Her face falls, and she breaks off the connection, the light going out of all screens at once.

 

”No, no, keep doing that, obviously you were enjoying yourself. Who am I to deny you some fun times?”

 

”Dad…”

 

”Jack.”

 

” _Sir_ , please, it was nothing.”

 

Sure, sure. It’s just that he can’t cope well with the idea of other people having a claim of her attention that he doesn’t.

 

He says he can’t sleep because the itching gets to him, not the skin but of the thoughts crawling in and out, mere inklings becoming fully fledged ideas that expand and grow until they’re pure obsessions. He starts spending time with her, hanging over her shoulder like a hawk, watching each sliver of video footage she relays as he searches for what is missing. Hyperion moves in and takes the little it deems necessary to take, but–

 

”It’s not enough.”

 

”What more do you want?”

 

”Pandora herself.”

 

The room is bathed in a bright cold light as the screens flood with rows of information, maps, scans… _Plans_. ”Then use me for that too.”

 

That day, he signs off on the construction blueprints of her new home: a castle, a palace, a place where she’ll be safe and he will watch over her. Her home deep underground, the path to her haven guarded by the most vicious creations Hyperion have put together, and at the top, he’ll be the only one able to get in and out as he pleases.

 

She sees the plan and smiles, tears in her eyes.

 

* * *

 

 

The first thing they do once the core of her new home is finished is to travel there and plug her into the ECHOnet. She spends the journey gazing out the window at the vastness of space, breath fluttering against the window, fingers fanning out in childish gestures as she brings her fingers together and part them again.

 

”What are you doing?” he asks, annoyed, taking her hands in his to still their incessant motion.

 

”Measuring the spaces and places I’ll never see.”

 

”You think this is where it ends?”

 

She opens her mouth, changes her mind, and resumes staring out the window.

 

Once they arrive, he puts her down on a chair and shaves the side of her head, carefully trimming away any hair before washing the skin with alcohol. "This will hurt."

 

Her hands clenched, eyes shut, she inclines her head to the side, offering herself up to him. She doesn’t cry as the scalpel slices through her skin, peeling it back. As he cuts and pushes the implant into place, she sits perfectly still, only a wrinkle between her brows betraying the pain she suffers through. Her lips part in a gasp as he turns off the safety on the implant, the sharp intake of breath echoing in the empty room and bouncing between the sterile white walls. The fluorescent ceiling lights begin flickering in rhythm with her breathing as he seals the wound up.

 

"I see," she says, the lights buzzing before exploding, glass cascading down around them.

 

Jack covers her with his body, arms wrapped around her delicate shoulders, her warm breath tickling his collarbones. Her hands shake as she grasps at his shirt, slender fingers crumpling the fabric.

 

“Dad… I see Pandora… And I will give you Pandora.”

 

He strokes the unshaven side of her head. “Yes, honey. Yes you will.”

 

* * *

 

 

Her installation into the core is a living nightmare. Angel herself is calm enough, but the surges of power, the intense connection to an entire planet, makes her decidedly volatile. She can’t control herself as her own energies flare up, lashing out at the staff for no reason whatsoever. The dead bodies stack up and the floors around her grow stained with blood, but she never asks him to stop, instead clinging to the cords sunk into her ports as she breathes in deep, bracing herself before plugging another in.

 

”I’m growing,” she explains, sweat dripping down her forehead as her knees shake. ”This planet… This… I can see…” She clutches at her head, sparks fly, and another person drops dead as she open her eyes. ”I can _feel_ Pandora.”

 

”That’s my girl.” He snaps his fingers and two men hesitantly approach to pick the still-shuddering body off the floor. A pool of blood oozes out of the burst skin and he picks Angel up to avoid it getting on her feet. To his surprise, she hugs him tight, and he tries to pat her back but he can’t reach it, his path blocked by all the cords keeping her tethered. Letting her cling to him for a while, he finally deems it to have been enough and drops her. Except she stays, not weighing anything.

 

Wings unfurled, she floats in the air, the shuddering see-through feathers made of pure light clearer than ever, the wingspan wider than ever before.

 

It’s the last time she sets foot on a floor. After that, her wings are constantly spread, even when she sleeps, an activity she barely engages in – and when she does, she sleeps on a narrow bed in the middle of a room, flopped on her stomach and cradling the pillow to her chest. 

 

At night he goes up to the roof and watches the construction happening over the moon, the station quickly taking shape as the pre-fabricated pieces are assembled. His station. If he let her out, she’d be able to see how well he will keep a watch over her. ”Look at that, honey,” he says, turning on the communication device of his pocket-watch that is linked directly to her. ”Look at how I’ll look at you.”

 

”I see,” she whispers in his ear.

 

”And? What do you think?”

 

”Hmm.”

 

”Come on, Angel, you gotta admit, that’s spectacular.”

 

”It will sure cause an impression on Pandora.”

 

”No better way to announce the new ruling order. It’s gonna be you and me against them all. Speaking of which, there’s another thing we need to do today. How should we go about sacking New Haven?”

 

”I…” She audibly hesitates, swallows, then her voice becomes steady again. ”Let me scan through some military files. I will have a strategy within the hour.”

 

In silence, he counts the stars he can name. The Pandora sky is the same it ever was, but the great tidally locked moon obscures a vast part of the sky, leeching light and drawing the eye. Maybe Pandora could be enough, and maybe he could go on to have more. He just needs to have each despicable inch of this twisted planet under his thumb, then maybe he can squash his own bond to it.

 

Coming down, Blake and Moorin approaches him, the latter nervous and fidgeting. ”Sir, this Angel, we can’t go on like this.”

 

Jack blinks. ”Excuse me?”

 

”I went through old reports by your wife, she clearly states that if Angel starts causing accidents like this, the recommended course of action is to shut her down.”

 

Jack smiles as he pushes Moorin up against the wall. ”Jimmy,” he says over his shoulder, ”take a note: I’m strangling this idiot for bringing my wife up.” And the bones crack under his hand, such a familiar sensation that it almost makes him happy to perform the deed.

 

”Speaking of which, sir, Angel requested–”

 

”Now, Jimmy, all that has to go through me.” The life goes out of Moorin, and Jack drops him. ”What is it she wanted?”

 

”Eridium.”

 

”Huh.”

 

Angel is howling in the core as he comes in, blood gushing down her back as they try to attach a cable. She is trashing, hurting, crying, but not begging for mercy: the lips form shapes but no words. He shoos the workers away, who eagerly retreat as far from her as possible – the entire room reeks of burnt things. Though she shakes, she puts on a brave face, trying to be bright as he looks at her sweat-soaked clothes in distaste.

 

”Hello dad,” she says awkwardly, dry throat distorting her voice. Clearing it, she tries again but he stops her.

 

”My girl wanted something.” He presents her with a wrapped gift that she hesitantly takes, fingers fumbling as she struggles with the wrapping.

 

”Ah…” Angel takes the raw nugget of eridium into her hands, fingers skimming across the jagged surface. The small piece begins to shine, increasing in brightness before it suddenly turns liquid and vanishes, soaking into Angel’s hands without leaving a drop. Her tattoos shine, her pupils shrink, and she parts her lips. ”Oh.”

 

The fire alarms go off around the base, the hallways echo with screams, and she shifts into a different kind of light: colder, sharper, and far more intense. It burns to look directly at her.

 

”Sorry about that,” she says as the sprinklers turn on. ”I… It was intense.”

 

”What did you just do?”

 

”I’m not sure, but… I’d like some more. Please.”

 

He cups her face, thumbs pressing down on the cheeks. His hands slide down her left arm, tracing the tattoos, rubbing circles over them – they even feel different, like ice, so cold it hurts to touch, yet he doesn’t let go. ”Anything,” he mumbles, not understanding and yet putting his faith in that she knows what she’s tapping into, ”anything for my princess.”

 

* * *

 

 

Perched upon her throne, legs crossed and wings unfurled, she looks as grand as a goddess. Eyes heavy-lidded and chin resting in her palm, only her lips move once in a while, forming silent words that one second later appear in their full context on the screens surrounding her. Her naked arms, covered in goosebumps, have grown impossibly paler.

 

It seems a shame to interrupt her, the sight of her divinity a mark of his excellence. He moulded her, carved the throne out with blood and loss. Seven years ago, she was just a thin girl with awkward limbs and pudgy cheeks, strapped to a metal chair and hair in braids. He called her princess then, though in comparison she was not worthy of the title. Time and patience and dedicated effort has made her transcend far beyond her wildest dreams.

 

He puts on his mask, the cool plastic soothing the aching of the blue scar. It never ceases to feel warm, burning itself deeper. During the nights he often wake up, the fire having penetrated all the way down to his bones and consuming his very core.

 

”So, how do I look?” he asks. ”I’ve been trying to find the right word, but nothing comes to mind. ’Beautiful’ just doesn’t have the right ring to it.”

 

Angel opens her eyes fully, reaching her hands out to touch his face. Her fingers skim across the edges, then trace the nose, the mouth, the brow, all of them smoothly moving with his expressions.

 

”Handsome,” she states, hands still on his cheeks. 

 

”My clever girl. Almost always right on.” He takes her hands, kissed the knuckles, then press a kiss to her forehead. ”We’re going to do such grand things together here.”

 

”Yes, Jack.”

 

”Showtime.” He turns to the camera, smiling broadly. ”People of Pandora! This is your new leader, Handsome Jack, speaking!”

 

And that is where they truly begin: with the spotlights on him, a speech delivered a mere hour before they’re scheduled to release their might upon the bandits in New Haven.

 

Angel’s meticulous plans tug and pull at all her resources, but she bribes and coerces, nudges and hints until she has all the information she needs. Then she puts it together and _voila_. The army is dispatched as they watch from the safety of her core, the giant screens relaying each gruesome little detail in perfect clarity.

 

”What do you think of your vault hunters now?” Jack says triumphantly as they watch Wilhelm crush Roland’s left leg, Lilith phasing across the battlefield without being able to do anything as Wilhelm tosses Roland away like a crumpled piece of trash. Brick catches him, and Jack puts another handful of popcorn into his mouth. ”Watch, watch, Wilhelm’s going to absolutely crush them now!”

 

As Lilith exits her phasing with a massive blast that knocks half a dozen Hyperion soldiers off their feet, Wilhelm pounces on her. Her lithe frame stands no chance against his pincers.

 

”Horrific,” Angel comments, blinking slowly. ”Pawn to E4.”

 

”Queen’s Gambit again? You’re getting predictable.” Still, he moves the piece for her, as she is partially occupied with directing the assault on New Haven. On the screen, one of Lilith’s limbs takes on an unnatural bend and Brick makes a foolish attempt to defend her. ”They really are a bunch of idiots.”

 

She says nothing, and it starts to get on his nerves.

 

”Are you paying attention?”

 

Her head snaps up just in time to see Brick landing on the ground, unconscious, as soldiers swarm upon him and take him away. On the other side of the field, the Moxxi family drives their trucks in circles around the other vault hunters, buying them time and protection. ”Congratulations. You got one of them.”

 

”Not. Good. Enough.”

 

She wets her lips, then shapes a few words, a surge of light passing across her tattoos. Lilith, in the middle of making a run towards Brick, falls to the ground clutching the sides of her head, mouth hanging open in a scream. She gets up but staggers again, dizzy and nauseated from whatever Angel did to her, and Lilith tears at the ECHOnet connectors at her temples, crushing them with her boot. Only too late does she look up, and though she tries valiantly, phasing in and out in sudden bursts without getting anywhere, she is overpowered.

 

”You’re getting sloppy,” Jack comments, taking a bishop from the board.

 

”Lilith–” On the screens, a fiery explosions erupts, engulfing Lilith and everyone around her. When the initial blast disappears, only charred bodies remain. Angel clutches at the screen, her eyes moving frantically. ”She’s dead. She’s… She’s gone.”

 

”And I win,” Jack announces, knocking over her king. She tears herself away from the screen to look at the board, confusion written all over her face.

 

”But I…”

 

Slamming his hand down on the table, he’s done making the point, the lesson should have been learnt already – she’s smarter than this. ”They’re scum. They are the old Pandora order, and I am the new. They’re going, I’m staying. Am I making myself clear here?”

 

”Crystal clear. They’re bringing Brick in now.”

 

”Good. Get to work. You know their brains inside out, and I want you to tear. Him. _Apart_.”

 

When he demands absolute obedience, he expects to have it. She is subordinate to him in many ways now, their power structure laid clear: he is the father – she is the daughter: he demands – she fulfills. For a while, she does; she tells them what exactly to do to Brick, the female torturer having her fun cracking the neck of his puppy like it’s a stick. Angel finds all the pressure points upon which to tear the giant asunder, rendering him a crying mess who snivels and begs, snot and tears dripping down his face.

 

She does her work so well he doesn’t suspect her when Brick breaks free, but as the hours tick on and any hope of capturing the hulking bandit diminishes, he thinks it over.

 

”You helped, didn’t you?” he accuses as he storms in, tearing the eridium from her greedy hands. She’s been using more and more, the expensive substance simply vanishing between her hands as her light grows harsher to resemble a clear winter’s day.

 

She blinks up at him, a curl to her lips as if she’s balancing between a smile and tears.

 

”Tell me! You had a hand in this, come right out and say it! There’s no way that brute could have escaped on his own, he’s not clever enough, but you… You can get into anything. And there just happened to be a power fluctuation. That you would do this against your own father…” He interprets her silence as admission of guilt. ”Whose side are you really on? Theirs? Mine? I’m your father. _Your blood._ I made you and I can crush you. Don’t you ever dare forget that.” Weighing the eridium in his hand, he looks over the piece of purple rock. Then he pockets it.

 

”What are you doing?” Her wings shudder. ”You can’t…”

 

”If you want it, come with me.”

 

They move through the long corridors, Angel floating behind him as they ascend the installation. There’s fear written all over her, and rightly so: she may mean a lot to him, but she is ultimately his, and she must answer to his demands. Slamming open the doors, he puts an arm around her and pulls her close.

 

”This is what happens the next time you disobey me.”

 

A doctor, whose lazy hand and sloppy technique marred Angel’s neck during the last failed attempt to augment her powers through grafted technology, stands in the middle of the room, wearing a collar around his neck. He moves to touch it but his hands snap back when Jack wag a finger. 

 

”Ah-ah. We discussed that, and I’m sure you remember the pain. Humiliatingly excruciating, isn’t it? Well, humiliating for you, amusing for me. Hey, how about you take your belt off?” Jack gives Angel a tight squeeze with his arm. ”Sweetheart, this what will happen if you ever go against me, ever again. I will put that collar on you. I will make you obey. You won’t have a choice but to.”

 

”What does it do?”

 

”Interesting technology, really. Long story is really boring, but the short one is fun. It lets me control someone. Completely.” He does a circular motion around his neck, and the subject shudders but complies.

 

”Dad…”

 

”Hush now. Get up on the chair.” The man obeys. ”Now hang yourself.”

 

The man swings from side to side, kicking his legs feebly, the body spinning around. As he faces away from them, his limbs grow heavy and the movements die down to mere spasms before he stills completely. ”Amazing technology, really. R and D has been working hard on it, and it has truly paid off.”

 

”You hid this from me.”

 

He ignores the hurt look on her face. ”Don’t test me, Angel.”

 

She purses her mouth, tilting it to the side as she observes the corpse. ”I’d never dream of it.”

 

”No, none of that cryptic crap, none of your double-edged words. Just straight up promise me right here and now, that you won’t ever go against me.”

 

”I promise you my unending loyalty.”

 

”Good.” He squeezes her so hard she will bruise. ”Now tell me how to break them. Tell me how to crush them.”

 

”I just need a name.” Her eyelids flutter, she mouths a word. ”It’s done.”

 

”I’ll believe it when I see it,” he snarls, dragging her along by the scruff of her neck.

 

But she comes through. Within the day, their formerly tight little group splinters further: Brick commits an atrocity, Roland throws him out, and Mordecai steps to the sidelines, distancing himself from any direct involvement. Just one man remaining in Sanctuary. One man and an army of loyal-for-pay defectors. It’s so pathetic Jack can’t stop himself from laughing – too easy, too simple.

 

Angel, however, takes on a more morose viewpoint. ”They are removing my presence from Sanctuary,” she says sadly, the screens around her going blank one by one.

 

”What does it matter?” Cleaning the inside of her arm, he drives the IV needle through her skin. ”You have this. You have me. What else do you need?” Switching it on, the line fills up with the luminescent purple liquid, pumping right into her bloodstream.

 

She gasps, arching her back.

 

He turns off the lights one by one, until she grows conscious of his movements and do it for him. She lights up the path he needs to take through the darkness of the facility, all the lamps turned down low to ease impact on her sore light-deprived eyes. Small luminous circles grow in front and vanish behind him, until he stands in front of her again. With the lights out, the only thing he sees are her wings, wide and dappled in heavenly light.

 

”It matters,” she says in a hushed whisper, ”because I could have given you so much more.”

 

”I expect failures from you. It gives you something to live up to. It makes your successes all the sweeter for me.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

He comes, he goes, as he pleases and wants to, not when she desires. 

 

And life, life is bliss. Power, once it flows through his hands, is like a natural state of mind, something he missed and now won’t ever let go of. Following where it beckons him, it leads him to ascend the ladder of Hyperion Corporation until at last he stands in front of Tassiter, whose glare can do nothing to intimidate Jack now, because he’s the greater man and Tassiter is just a pesky bug about to be squashed.

 

Wrapping the chain twice around Tassiter’s neck, he enjoys the way the man grunts and snorts as he dies, sounding like a sick pig. He even looks the part.

 

Seizing power comes to him like breathing, he does it so well that he can’t see an end to it.

 

The Crimson Raiders, pushed into a corner, try and try to lash back, but their efforts are futile and poorly organized, or rather – organized by a lonely man who has lost so much that he can’t focus on anything but striking out at his sworn enemy, which amuses the hell out of Jack. Such a broken man, shattered in all the right places, and easy to keep distracted enough to be merely a fly buzzing around his head. Annoying, but… Little else.

 

He trusts in Angel to device a plan in which to put them out of business forever when the time comes. She owes him that, at least.

 

On a regular mid-week visit to her with the intent to see if she has made any progress, he hears noises in the corridor leading to where she is that makes his stomach clench.

 

”I could help you break free, you know. It’s not impossible.” A man’s voice. Familiar. One of the researchers that have been working on improving the stability of Angel’s vitals.

 

”Oh?” Angel replies.

 

”I’ll stab him when he comes in. Then we can run away, together. I know places Hyperion won’t come looking for us.”

 

”Sounds lovely,” she sighs, followed by a clatter. ”Can I hold the knife? I just want to touch it.”

 

”Sure, here. I promise you, I’ll take good care of you.”

 

”That’s the thing though… I’m already set for life.”

 

”What?” There’s a streak of panic to his voice.

 

Jack pauses outside the room, pulling out a gun from the holster at his thigh. As he rounds the corner, finger ready on the trigger, it turns out he won’t need it.

 

”You shouldn’t have thought of all this.” Angel says sadly, sinking the blade into the young man’s throat. Blood spurts out onto her determined hands and expressionless face, twisting the knife once before letting go and allowing him to bleed out on the floor. She turns to Jack and holds up her blood-stained hands. ”He didn’t just want you dead, dad. He wanted something from me. I didn’t want to give it.”

 

He puts away the gun, taking her bloody hands in his, letting them stain him too. ”Good girl. We’re takers now. Not the ones who get taken from.”

 

She nods, lips drawn tightly together.

 

* * *

 

 

Together with Wilhelm, he pays a visit to doctor Patricia Tannis, whose inane blabbering is shut down when he starts smashing her chairs. The ridiculous woman pleads for mercy and reveals the hidden safety box, but after they take the key they still break her hands before leaving her bleeding and crying on the floor. ”That’s real merciful of me,” he says, dusting himself off. ”Because if I was a lesser man, like the bandits you associate with, then imagine the horrible things I would have done to you. I mean, I can’t, because I’m not that awful. But you probably know how they deal with their enemies.”

 

Her rambling notes tell of connections, of sirens and Vaults intertwining. Nothing he didn’t know before. Of another Vault – that he didn’t know.

 

He gives the key to Angel, a gift and a tribute and a condition of her existence all at once, and she spends all her waking hours channeling the excess energy build-up into the key. She struggles to balance it, the key draining her while she tries to cling to the ECHOnet, her consciousness intricately woven into it, her neural pathways stretching across the entire planet. All it sees and all it hears come through her, but the division of power makes him frustrated.

 

”What’s the point of you having that if it only makes you useless,” he remarks one day, and she, gasping as she shifts out of the ECHOnet, swoops down from where she has been floating near the ceiling.

 

”I can only do so much.”

 

”No, Angel, you can do so much _more_. You transcended being a mere human the day you were born. I’m giving you all the eridium I have, you should be able to do better.”

 

”Sorry, sir, I’ll try.”

 

”Don’t. Try. Just do it. Make it happen.” Shifting tone, he waves her closer. ”Anyway, come look at this.” On the screens, cameras sweep over Opportunity – his perfect city, his perfected Pandora – and linger at the statues of two faceless women being carved in the middle of city hall. One dressed in a fancy well-cut suit, the other having marble shaped to look like draped fabric cascading down her body, the hint of something sprouting from her back.

 

”Is that…” Angel hangs over his shoulders, her arms coming around and closing on the front of his chest.

 

”Yes,” he says, patting her cheek. _A monument to the women who made him_.

 

”A monument to the women who nearly destroyed you,” she whispers in his ear, giving him a kiss on the temple before she floats away.

 

The next day, he has them not only torn down, but first decapitated and then ruthlessly crushed until only dust remains. The only other statues he commissions will be of him and him alone.

 

* * *

 

 

Power is such an intoxicating rush, but sometimes Angel looks at him like she’s disappointed, and he snaps at her to do better. She doesn’t grit her teeth and try harder like she used to, but she does perform the tasks he asks her to, combing through each part of Pandora for the things he want. Nothing can truly hide out of her sights if she sets her mind to it – unfortunately, her attention is split, the key draining her, and he has to cycle her out of charging it at times just to ensure she can survive.

 

It frustrates him more than he can stand.

 

”Why are you so weak?” he snarls at her, and she doesn’t respond.

 

Still, at night, he finds that crawling and nagging sensation returning – it’s not enough. Just having a grip on it all doesn’t satisfy him. The insidious truth that laces his thought is this: _he wants more, he wants it all_.

 

Only the guidance that used to be doesn’t come anymore, because he doesn’t dream at all. 

 

He ventures to the Core after a late night of wining and dining his current girlfriend, and Angel says, ”true Gods don’t dream,” her voice distant, arms wrapped around the key as it glows in tune with her heartbeat.

 

”And you’re saying, what, exactly?”

 

She smiles, holding her hand out, beckoning him closer. ”The key showed me what the Vault contains.”

 

”Another Vault, another ancient god that has to be killed?”

 

”No, not quite. Here.” She puts his hands on top of the key, and he is immediately assaulted by a vision that burns, his blood boiling like lava, but there he sees it: a vague shape, a faint idea forming the longer and harder he fights against the burning. Yes… He sees it. A monster, a terror and force one can own… And control…

 

She peels his fingers away: they’re burnt and blood trickles forth from the charred cracks in his skin.

 

”Find it, Angel,” he says as she stares in horror at his hands. ”Find it. I need it.”

 

* * *

 

 

The eridium flowing through her begins to serve a different purpose, and their aimlessness becomes sharpened into a goal, one that she throws herself into.

 

She’s weak, though. The key takes more of her than she can give, but if he pushes her to rescind on the ECHOnet his control of Pandora slips. Neither situation favors his goal, but dragging his heels around waiting for her isn’t his preferred way of spending time either.

 

So she points out, Sanctuary still stands.

 

”And that’s your problem to solve,” he says. ”But fine, I’ll think of something.”

 

”Use the myths to your advantage. It’s what we do.”

 

”Don’t tell me what to do.”

 

”It’s what I have always done,” she says, shadow of a smirk flashing by as she turns away.

 

He comes up with it – an ingenious plan, really – and she polishes it, refines it. He adds a randomization generator to ensure that Roland never figures it out, not that he is clever enough anyway. The man’s sharpness has dimmed considerably.

 

Of course, the vault hunters they draw in at first are pitiful. They crumble under the weight that Pandora pressures them with, and Jack laughs as they die, because it’s genuinely hilarious that he is so good at smothering resistance before it’s even born now. Angel shyly points out that he needs at least some alive, and annoyed, he admits she’s right.

 

So they pick their way through prospective files, Angel not betting on anyone though he eagerly lures them to Pandora… Where they quickly perish.

 

”What are they doing wrong?” he seethes, watching another handful of them fall apart as a group and spreading to the wind.

 

”You’re not patient enough. And they, perhaps, have nothing to unite against.”

 

”So we push them harder, is what you’re saying.”

 

”Maybe you should leave this to me.”

 

”Fine. I have a date anyway.”

 

Angel says nothing – she refrains from commenting on his girlfriends ever since she pointed out that Moxxi might be cheating on him and he couldn’t get the idea out of his head, so he ruined everything Moxxi ever held dear. It seemed justified.

 

Life circles onwards, there’s always something to do, but it’s boring since it all just adds up to one thing: waiting. He wastes time and time drags itself onwards, his little girl adding digits to her age, ravenously devouring eridium like it’s air, and giving him nothing.

 

Some nights, he thinks: _I don’t love her, I don’t love her_ , but then he goes to see her again and it returns, stronger than before. She’s his girl. His siren. His Angel. Above all, she’s the key to his answers.

 

One day, she calls for him. ”Do you want to play a game?”

 

Angel sets up the chess pieces on the table, taking her time dusting off each pawn, sneezing now and then. Even with a tube pumping eridium straight into her, she moves easily enough, knowing how not to get tangled in the cords and wires, her toes skimming the floor as she moves around. Finally, she flies up to the nearest screen mounted on the wall, putting her hand to the surface. It shows a train, just about to depart, a small group of people climbing into a cart and cautiously introducing themselves to each other.

 

”I think you’ve gathered a good group of potentials,” Jack remarks, pulling up a chair and sitting down, placing his whiskey glass next to the chess set. ”How long do you think these ones will survive?”

 

”Long enough.” She looks pleased with herself as she comes down only long enough to respond to his first move, but he grabs her wrist and holds tight.

 

”Come on. They can deal with their impending doom on their own.”

 

Legs folded, she sits down on the opposite chair, bent forward to allow room for the spinal attachments.

 

”You got a long-term plan here, don’t you?” he comments as she moves the pieces across the table without hesitation.

 

”Always. It’s a fun tactic. To stay one step ahead.”

 

”Don’t run too far ahead though.”

 

”Dad, I see only so far.”

 

”And what’s the last thing you can see?”

 

She averts her eyes. ”Possibilities. The future changes, some things stand out as more probable, some projections of it more advantageous. Belief in one does not exclude another from happening, but belief in one makes it possible to realize it.”

 

On the screen, another train explodes and derails out in the frozen wastes.

 

”But what do you see?”

 

”The way all things end. Death.”

 

A cold shiver runs down his spine. ”We’ll have to figure out a way around that.”

 

”Defying death?”

 

”Honey, if we can claim Pandora, if we can rule it, how can death have anything to add?” He knocks down one of her bishops, but he already sees the angle she is working to win over him. ”So what do you think will make these ones succeed where countless others have failed?”

 

”I believe in them. Check mate,” she says with a smile.


	6. Chapter 6

 

”So the plan is,” Jack says, leaning on the monitors, ”to make these bandits trust you enough to help us lower Sanctuary’s shields? No offense, but are they really that stupid?”

 

”It’s a deception,” Angel replies, gathering her hair up in a sideways ponytail as she puts two cords into the implant ports at the side of her skull. They slide in with a wet squish, goosebumps on her arm. ”You have to play your part too.”

 

”And that’s it?”

 

”More or less.”

 

”Well, if you’re right on this, then…”

 

”I will have solved the Sanctuary problem.” She flashes him a proud smile, her mouth already moving as she reaches out to the vault hunters dusting themselves off from the train crash.

 

As she is about to speak, he puts a finger over her lips. ”Remember: light, breezy, friendly. Imagine that you’re an AI, programmed to be their friends, then programmed to stab them in the back.”

 

”Got it.” Above her hangs five screens, one devoted to each of them – if their hearts so much as skip a beat, if their breath hitches, if their pupils widen, she will know. They have accepted the technology of Pandora into them – they carry the guns, they wear the shields, they trade and live on her terms. By accepting Pandora’s technology, they have accepted Angel into their lives.

 

And she is a careful observer. Eyes glued to the screens, she can barely peel herself away even when Jack demands her attention. ”They’re sleeping,” he says, annoyed, and she still breaks out into that dreamy smile, her gaze distant.

 

”But they sleep so lightly. Maya keeps waking up, all covered in cold sweat, then settling down to read until she passes out. And–”

 

”Honey.” He holds her, though touching her frosty skin hurts, pulling her away from the screen. ”You’re watching them very closely. I’m hoping we won’t have a repeat performance?”

 

”Of course not.”

 

”Good. Glad we cleared that up.” He hangs around nonetheless, one hand on her shoulder, pressing his fingers against her collarbone each time she slips up. Her language has taken a dive for the worse – a regrettable side-effect of immersing herself in the lives of such scum. Though he corrects her, she sometimes lets her tongue fly loose; he pinches the skin at the back of her neck, the precious little of it left untouched by their grafting enhancements, and she squeaks.

 

”Sir, please,” she pleads, rubbing at the back of her neck. ”You need to do your part, too. Goad them. As we discussed.”

 

And so he does. The role she gives him is easy: give them an aim to rally around, a point opposed to theirs. He’s the golden boy to their dirty stains of lives besmirching Pandora, the savior to their heretical teachings spelled out in bullets and blood. According to Angel, this way they will find a reason to band together. ”The reason being you.”

 

”Bandits need a hero to tear down,” he smirks, patting her cheek as he leaves. ”You behave now.”

 

”I’ll try.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

He contacts the vault hunters whenever he pleases, often between business appointments, chewing on snacks as he takes a five minute break. He spares nothing when it comes to them – he knows what they are, no matter how they try to pretend otherwise. They are filth, and he’s going to wipe them away once they have served their part.

 

They follow her planned trajectories, her voice gently encouraging them while he stokes the spiteful fires – and he genuinely enjoys it. She charts their progress, frustrated with their little diversions elsewhere. ”Let them take their time,” he says as she anxiously bites her thumb, ”it’s not like they have that much more left of it. Or well, in the bandit afterlife, maybe, where they can all sit around and shoot at images of good, beautiful people.”

 

She gnaws so hard on her fingers that the skin breaks. When the blood seeps out, it’s tinged with tiny purple flecks.

 

And things do go according to plan… Up until Sanctuary. As the bombardment wrecks the city, as he laughs from where he watches in orbit, things take a sudden turn for the unexpected. 

 

When he arrives in the core, Angel shoots up from where she sits, floating above him just out of reach as he tries to grab onto her ankles. ”Get down here!” he demands, and she wriggles free, seeking higher altitude as she clings to the thick exposed cables. ”You get down here right now, young lady!”

 

”Everything went according to plan!” she shouts, peeking down through the mess of wires hanging down. He reaches for his pistol and fires a warning round into the opposite wall, causing her to flinch.

 

He speaks slowly, carefully, the words dripping from his mouth like ice. ”If everything went according to plan, Sanctuary would be rubble right now. We’d have Roland’s head on a pike. We do not. Sanctuary still exists. And now they apparently have a siren.”

 

”I…”

 

”Did you know about Lilith?”

 

”She was an unknown variable.”

 

”No, Angel, an unknown variable is when neither of us knows about it. You have seen everything the vault hunters have. How could you miss this?”

 

”A glitch, a fluke, a human error.”

 

”You don’t make mistakes, Angel.”

 

She flits around nervously, still out of reach. He shoots another warning shot, though it’s more frustration than anything else, and lets out a scream as he kicks over her chair. ”I have to go do something about this! You still owe me their heads!”

 

As he’s about to leave, she shouts from up above, her voice cracking at the edges. ”Dad!”

 

He whirls around, flaring with the intensity of his rage. ”What?”

 

”I’m… I’m sorry about this.”

 

”Then show me. Atone for this.”

 

She averts her gaze, wringing her hands, but her silence speaks volumes. He sneers as he leaves, seethes all the way through the debriefings and new project plans paraded in front of his desk. Eventually he snaps at that too, pushing it away, and in Opportunity, he meets the sheriff in a hotel lobby. Her boots stain the carpet and she taps her fingers against the desk, waiting impatiently even though he’s right on time. She takes no argument from him, pushing him onto the bed as she takes off everything but the hat.

 

He only likes women who crush him completely, and she’s no exception. She doesn’t ask what’s bothering him, and he makes no attempt to explain it. She doesn’t know – no one knows – Angel is his secret these days. He swept the galaxy clean of people who know she’s still alive, tucked away in the wilderness of Pandora, controlling the flow of the ECHOnet with her mind.

 

Without mercy, she squashes the thoughts right out of his head, and he collapses on bed to drift off into a blissful sleep. There are no dreams, of course – just the murmur of drills chipping their way towards the Vault.

 

When he wakes he’s alone. She has left a note on her pillow, a napkin with a kiss imprinted on it, her signature scrawled at the bottom.

 

In the suite bathroom, he takes off his mask. Clear lines mark where it ends, where it covers his face from the sun, the deep blue scar aching as it always does when exposed to air. The icy water stings, but he scrubs himself neat and clean, avoiding looking too close at his own skin. When the mask slides back into place, his ECHO communicator beeps from the other room, but he stays a while. The mask is flawless, ageless, stainless. The mask is the better him. _No_ , he corrects, it’s part of _him_. It is the face of Handsome Jack, and whoever remains beneath that isn’t someone interesting anymore.

 

Shrugging into his shirt, he checks the ECHO device and nearly tears the fabric at what he hears. ”Angel,” he says, careful not to shout at her, making a point of having the vault hunters hearing it, ”you can stop pretending to help them now. We got what we wanted.”

 

Except she doesn’t respond, and he feels something heavy settle into his chest. Struggling into the rest of his clothing he rushes to the core, all the while talking to her over the ECHOnet. The stern tone to his voice seems to pass her by entirely, or she is willfully ignoring it, and it makes his throat tighten because she isn’t supposed to act like this, she’s not a stubborn teenager, she never behaved like this then. But here his petulant daughter is doing what she can to help that merry band of thieves.

 

Storming in, he finds her sitting perfectly still on the floor, legs folded under her. She heaves a deep, tired sigh as he growls in frustration. ”What are you doing?” He shakes her by the shoulders, and she meets his gaze unfazed.

 

”I am doing what I must.”

 

”Helping them?”

 

”It is part of my plan.”

 

”I don’t care what your plan is anymore. You’re forbidden from talking to them anymore. Know what, you shouldn’t even watch them!” He almost tears at his hair, the way she looks at him – as if he’s _wrong_ , as if she’s _right_ – but instead marches out to get the only thing he can think of. Raiding the supply closet he finds it and with crowbar in hand, he swings it at the screens, shattering them one by one, breaking them into irreparable pieces.

 

She watches in paralyzed horror, her lips trembling and big blue eyes rimmed with tears, but nothing snaps in her. As he breaks the last screen he pushes back the loose hair, wipes spit from his chin, and glares at her. ”That’s it.”

 

”Why would you do this?”

 

”Because you’re going to obey me. You’re meant to. I’m the hero, Angel, not them, and you’re meant to help me.”

 

”I don’t have a say, do I?”

 

”You’re my daughter!” he bellows, throat aching as he towers above her. ”Blood matters more than anything else! Family matters!”

 

”But…” She surveys the landscape of broken electronics, the screens still flickering now and again with a ghostlike trace of statistics. ”Is that all?”

 

”That’s it, Angel. Now stop acting like this and come here.” He holds out his hand, but when she doesn’t take it of her own accord he jerks her up from the floor.

 

”You know nothing about me, do you?” It’s not an accusation, just a sad question.

 

”Wrong! I know all there is to know about you! You may be special, you may be my daughter, but there are no secrets to you.”

 

She closes her mouth, lowers her eyes, and he softens a little, pulling her in for a hug that she does not reciprocate. 

 

”That’s just the harsh truth, darling. This is all you are. But what else do you need?”

 

”Get out.” She speaks slow and careful, but when he doesn’t let go, she repeats it. ”Get. _Out_.”

 

”Excuse me?”

 

”Leave. I want you to leave.” She pushes him away, and when he reaches out for her again she flicks a finger against the panel. The doors shut and all the lights go off except for the red emergency lamps. A broken screen flickers and the word _LEAVE_ flashes by.

 

He kicks at the door, pounding it with his fists. ”Angel, you can’t do this to me! I am your father!”

 

Another message appears on the screen. _I will drain this facility of air._

 

”That’s not even a thing we built it for!”

 

_No. I added that_.

 

”Angel!” He kicks the door again, but it doesn’t budge.

 

* * *

 

 

He knows she’s listening in to him – there’s nothing else for her to do. She is caught, blinded from seeing anything but what he wants her to see, and though it might seem harsh, it’s necessary. She still won’t let him near her, still won’t address him directly, but he can cope. Petulant tantrum aside, he doesn’t have a pressing need for her right now. If she wants to, she can just sit in there and sulk for all he cares.

 

Nonetheless, her face sometimes appears over the screens on the Hyperion station, a ghost passing through before vanishing without a word or message. All she can do is watch and listen as he takes the stage.

 

”You like them so much, huh?” he says as she stares at him from a screen. ”How much do you like them broken? Are they worth anything to you then?”

 

The engineers attach the collar to the wild and mutated bird.

 

She says nothing, withholding her voice, denying him any guidance. Fine. It’s not like he needs her. It’s not like she’ll come around once he proves that no one can rise above him.

 

On his screen, Bloodwing takes off from her holding cell, giving out a bone-chilling shriek of pain. ”You don’t need to kill a man to destroy him,” he says with a content smirk, leaning back in his seat. ”You just have to destroy what he loves.”

 

”I know,” she says quietly.

 

”Good to hear you can still speak.”

 

But she offers nothing else.

 

He tries to wait, but when she somehow gets access to the ECHOnet again, to seeing the vault hunters – and really, he should have known it’d happen, she’s far too smart for her own good – her words lead them to Opportunity. In his perfect city, they come with their muddy boots and smear the windows with blood, dragging dirt and dust to a place that should have none. They step in his vision, in the heart of future Pandora, and spit on his creation.

 

He can’t deny it anymore. This is her doing. She’s sinking the knife deep into his back and she’s not even apologizing for it. As patient as Jack can be, Angel manages to tip him over. He breaks into the facility, forcing his way past her security lockdowns. The core is empty, littered with junk food wrappers and dust, and he recoils at the filth. There’s no order, no nothing. Just a disgusting mess of things that he never gave her.

 

He searches quietly, listening for any hint of her. She knows the place better than he does, but when she truly sinks into the ECHOnet, she notices nothing in the real world – and seeing as her mind wanders the streets of Opportunity, looking over the shoulder of the vault hunters, she is vulnerable. It’s the perfect moment to strike.

 

She has herself tucked away deep in the labyrinth of servers, her back to turned to him as she hunches over an old monitor, her enhanced spine jutting out as the skin stretches over the sub-dermal implants, incision scars criss-crossing her skin. Fingering the collar in his hand, he clicks it open as silently as possible. She doesn’t stir, her mouth moving silently.

 

As he puts it around her neck she lets out a scream, clutching at her throat and gasping for air as she falls back on the floor. ”Did you think you could hide from me?” he asks spitefully, circling around her as she writhes on the floor in agony. ”Say goodbye to your friends.” Stooping down, he pulls at the collar. ” _Say it_.”

 

What she whispers he can’t hear, and it infuriates him all the more. ”What else did you get them? Huh?” He jerks at the collar.

 

She scrunches up her face in pain, the impulse to withhold or outright lie quashed against the power of the collar. ”The password.”

 

He pulls her up on her feet. ”Why? Why are you doing this to me?”

 

”Because enough is enough.”

 

”Enough what? Love? Because I sure as hell have been giving you that unconditionally!”

 

”But you haven’t! Dad, all I wanted was for you to be free. For us to be free, to be ourselves. Pandora has twisted you and ruined me.” She struggles to keep up with him, her feet taking off from the ground before she falls down again. He doesn’t care. He pulls and tugs.

 

”Why do you want to hurt me so?” he asks as he connects the electric chains to her collar and the IV tubes to her arms. ”What have they put in your head that makes you hate me?”

 

”You’ve done nothing but hurt me my entire life.” She’s almost crying, slipping her fingers under the collar even though it gives her small shocks. ”Please, Jack… Dad… I can’t… It hurts.”

 

”I’m going to fix this.” He holds her face between his hands. ”Do you hear me? I’m going to kill them and you’ll wake up from this delusion, and everything will be alright again.”

 

Tears spill down from her eyes. ”But it won’t,” she sobs, clutching at his sleeves. ”Dad, you’re wrong. We’re lost causes now. We’re going to die.”

 

”No, honey, listen to me. Listen.” He tries to smile, but all he does is put her face against his shoulder, pressing it close, her sobs shaking her entire body. ”Listen.” He strokes her hair. ”You’re wrong. We’re the heroes. We always come out on top. We are going to win. You’ve just been led astray, and I’m going to bring you back to me.”

 

She tries to say something but he presses her even harder against his chest, cutting off any rebuke on her tongue. It takes him all his might to leave, but her words are like poison, her flawed point of view trying to shake his world. It’s deeply unsettling to see his girl fall from grace, to see her swayed away from him, and he vows to find the vault hunters and make them suffer for what they have done to his precious darling.

 

Only they find her first. She has managed to lead them to her, and he spares nothing. They have to be stopped. She has to be protected. While he mocks and derides the vault hunters, he also works frantically to find a way past her security blockade against him, but nothing works.

 

”I turn my back on you for one minute–” he shouts at the screen where her projection moves, the hair fluttering in the imaginary wind. It’s a picture of who she never became. She offers no reply, just stares at him with her big blue eyes and closed mouth.

 

As they enter the core, he falls down his knees, turning to her. ”Please, Angel, we can work this out. Just poison them, shoot them, something.” When she doesn’t respond, he screams: ”I order you to defend yourself!”

 

And she refuses to address him directly, the eyes dry, her lips a thin line. In her face, he sees his world crumbling, and he tries with all his might to hold it together. He tells the vault hunters the things he will do to them, he tries to bargain with them, ”she’s innocent, how dare you involve _her_ ” but they won’t listen. He has no power over the situation, and he has to watch his girl from afar as they slice at the last remains of life in her. They destroy injector after injector, flout all his attempts at controlling the situation, and Angel’s screams cut right through to his heart.

 

She’s dying and there’s nothing he can do.

 

She sinks to the floor and even her last words are tainted by the vault hunters, it’s not something she would ever say, she’s been led so far astray and left there to die, and… She dies, the screen abruptly shuts off, and feels the icy chill take hold of his entire being. 

 

He takes a deep breath. Grabbing the pistol, the teleportation block Angel put in place is gone. As he materializes in the core, he shoots Roland in the back without a second thought and Lilith, ever so predictable, ever so driven by her blinding rage, falls right into his hands. She disobeys him, of course, and he sneers as he drags her away from Angel.

 

”You’re pathetic,” he hisses in her ear. ”Disgusting. You think things are bad for you now? Roland was just the start. I’m going to take apart everything in your life, and you won’t be able to do a thing to stop me.” He throws the collared Lilith into the arms of some soldiers. ”Get her away from me. Take her to the siren holding cells. And leave me alone.”

 

Returning to the core, he kneels in front of Angel, her skin no longer the icy cool it used to be, warming up. He removes the collar from her neck and cradles her close. ”Why, Angel?” he whispers to her, pressing his lips to her forehead, to her cheek. Her body remains limp. He sits there for hours, asking the same question over and over, his back aching, but he can’t let go of her.

 

He doesn’t know how.

 

Entombing her in a cryo-freeze tub, he stares at her night and day, the frost lining her lips and crusting her eyelashes. The scientists nervously say, _we can’t do anything, it’s too late, there’s nothing science can do_. He shoots them. _She’s ruined. Just a vessel._ Shoots the new ones. _She’s gone_. He lowers his pistol. ”I don’t care.” Then shoots them too, because they won’t do what he demands. ”Bring her back to me.”

 

Angel left a message for him. He hesitates to play it, goes away, comes back, decides against it.

 

In the holding cells, Lilith screams his name, spits at his face, snarls each time they up her eridium dose. ”Go on,” he says. Every time Lilith says something about Angel, he drives the blade deep into her side. The eridium heals her right back up, but the pain she feels nothing can detract from. ”Do it again,” he says, ”I dare you.” She does, and he gets the pleasure of stabbing her again. It never gets old.

 

It’s a kind of joy, but not enough.

 

The night before he plans to move them to the Vault, he goes to where Angel’s body is kept, her face peacefully neutral, unaware of what is going on. ”This is all for you, sweetheart,” he says, raising the flask to her. ”I’m gonna make it. I’m going to fix everything. You’re dead, but…” He trails off. In his hand, he holds the ECHO log she recorded for him. Against his better judgement, he pressed play.

 

Hearing her voice again makes him smile even as it brings a tear to his functional eye. ” _I have thought about how to say this, how to let you down easily, but there’s nothing to cushion the truth: I succeeded as much as I failed. What I wanted to give both of us never happened. Forgive me. Forgive me for leading you here, thinking I had the power to change the course you were doomed to take. My own hubris, like yours, is what undid us in the end_.” He glares up at her: she’s dead. She’s dead and she still says these things, hurts him, maintaining the false beliefs and flawed ideas. ” _Remember the password, dad. Remember it as if I could say it to you still_.” She’s dead, and she still twists the knife she pushed into his heart.

 

He throws the ECHO log against the solid glass. As it shatters into a hundred pieces he immediately regrets his decision, spending the night trying to recover it, but all he gets are scattered fragments, nothing enough to recreate her. He sits on the floor, taking more swigs. In the tank a crack has appeared from where he hit it, and it spreads little by little, but nothing breaks. Her coffin holds her still.

 

”I’d forgive you baby,” he says, putting a hand on the cool glass. ”Just come back.”

 

And she’s dead and she won’t ever answer him again, and he hates her for leaving because who will guide him? He sees himself in the reflection: if nothing else, if this is the end – and it isn’t, it can’t be, it won’t be – he’s at least going to destroy them for killing her.

 

* * *

 

 

When he dies, he thinks he hears Angel calling his name, thinks he sees a sliver of her light, thinks he feels the icy touch of her hand upon his.

 

_They stand in front of a fire in the desolate desert, the night falling all around them, but there are no stars, there is no moon. Just the light of the fire and the glow of her wings._

 

_”I’ve been waiting,” she says, smiling as she pats the ground next to her._

 

_”Honey…”_

 

_”It’s okay. We got time.”_

 

_”This isn’t how it was meant to happen.”_

 

_”There were never going to be any happy endings for either of us.” She stokes the fire with a stick, prodding the glowing coals. ”We make do with what we got. Now come. I’ll tell you a story. Of a man who tried to be a god, and of his daughter who tore down his would-be empire. Except I can lie, for you, and make it happy. Give it the ending you want. Just come here. Sit with me.”_

 

_She holds up her hand, waiting._

 

_To hold her feels like grasping an icicle._

 

Then he closes his eyes, and it’s all a dark void.


End file.
